The Ohio Department of Higher Education Working with Digital Science to Develop a Statewide Research Expertise Portal in New $1.5m Project

Unique public portal will increase visibility of Ohio’s university research programs, promote faculty expertise, and showcase campus facilities and equipment critical to the innovation process to industry partners

Research technology company Digital Science announced today that it has embarked on a project with the Ohio Department of Higher Education to work in partnership with the Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH) to highlight Ohio’s biomedical and engineering faculty and to showcase Ohio’s campus facilities and equipment critical to the innovation process. Named the Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx), this new research expertise portal will support inter-institutional collaborations, enhance connections with industry, and further assist technology commercialization across the state of Ohio.

The Ohio Innovation Exchange is a new initiative developed with six university partners: Case Western Reserve University, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, Cleveland State University, The University of Akron, and the University of Cincinnati – with sponsorship from the Ohio Department of Higher Education and accompanied by strong industry support through the Ohio Manufacturing Institute.

This innovative knowledge management framework will ultimately provide users with interactive tools to connect faculty, staff, and students with industry partners in new information-driven ways. The portal will help business gain access to high-end equipment, allow industry to tap into the next generation of employees, forge and seed new R&D partnerships, strengthen the supply chain, and ultimately stimulate job opportunities across Ohio.

This intuitive and innovative technology platform provided by Digital Science leverages a combination of off-the-shelf products designed to increase visibility and raise the awareness of research. It will serve multiple audiences and make use of:

• Dimensions: a research insights platform that links together grants, publications, patents, clinical trials, and policy documents to provide a more complete view of global research activity. The Dimensions structure and capabilities included within the portal will enable users to track research trends, identify people and research groups of interest to promote academic-industry-public sector engagement and collaboration, and provide the public search and discovery capabilities.
• Symplectic Elements: a leading Research Information Management system will become the definitive source of faculty and equipment data surfaced in the OIEx public portal. Elements will be used to collate faculty profiles and other related research information sourced from multiple institutional systems, and in doing so will become a unique source of research activity data for the state of Ohio.

The Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH) acts as the broker for institutional asset data, provides leadership for the project, and supports the ingest of critical and relevant data from Ohio’s institutions while supporting the secure user profiles.

Daniel Hook, MD of Digital Science, said:

 “Winning a competitive statewide tender was a major milestone for Digital Science and we are thrilled to be part of this truly collaborative project. The OIEx portal project will allow us to further enhance data integrations between Symplectic Elements and Dimensions and we very much hope the resulting platform will be used by industry partners, faculty, and public alike to discover and connect with those conducting innovative research across the state of Ohio.”

The new platform will be available in September 2018.