Translating technology taxonomies to facilitate cross-industry innovation

The Government technology innovation network-Innovate.Gov-is a cross-government extension of the Innovate.NASA (https://innovate.nasa.gov) platform, which was designed to crowdsource new opportunities for NASA technology. Innovate.Gov is a virtual collaboration platform to share technology across Federal agencies and serves as a unified hub for the public to access and innovate with government technology. Using this platform, government agencies share out technology information and engage the public to innovate with these inventions. The Innovate.Gov community collaborates to design improvements and integrations to revitalize these inventions, or propose new applications for these technologies (within and outside of their respective agencies). Innovate.Gov targets participants across a full range of organizations, professions, and areas of expertise, including: government, academia, research labs, private industry, and independent innovators. In order to fulfill the Innovate.Gov mission, technology information posted to the website must be made accessible to this diverse group of participants by applying a universal technology taxonomy. This paper explores our approach, challenges and solutions to translate the language of each agency´s technology across multiple disciplines to enable Innovate.Gov to tap into the power of open innovation. This paper describes our approach, which begins with the collection and synthesis of existing taxonomies across our partner government agencies, including the technology categorizations described in their strategic, planning and outreach documents (e.g. the 2012 NASA Space Technology Roadmaps, NASA Tech Briefs). Evaluations of technology discussions across social media were used to augment understanding of the informal taxonomy used by a broader group. This paper describes our solution to build a new taxonomy consistent with our government partners´ technology languages that simultaneously represents the full range of the rest o- the participant community. Specifically, we created a technology translation matrix to identify the major categories (buckets) of technology (e.g. robotics, materials) and align these overarching terms to agency-specific taxonomies. This matrix creates back-end connections between technologies and various tags to enable a seamless user experience on the Innovate.Gov site. It also automates cross-discipline translation that is individualized to each user and improves the site´s search capabilities. This paper also describes our approach to promote the wide spread adoption of the matrix through the creation of a social media strategy and program-specific taxonomy. Furthermore, this paper outlines the unique virtual showcase developed for the technology, which was designed to appeal to participants across multiple industries. For example, one technique entailed the development of “common language” titles to describe technologies by focusing on their function, regardless of their application. Finally, this paper describes the important role that a shared technology taxonomy can play in technological innovation. This new universal technology linguistics tool translation across agencies will promote increased cross-disciplinary collaboration, reduce duplication of efforts across agencies and the private sector, and support innovation and technology infusion across industry and academia.