The Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) tasked Ideateplus to tackle the critical challenge in its quest to efficiently evaluate the increased number of whitepapers and submissions it received across numerous ongoing challenges.
The traditional, manual process of reviewing these submissions had become unsustainable, with evaluators struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of proposals. This bottleneck threatened to delay the identification and funding of breakthrough innovations essential to advancing naval research and defense technologies. The organization recognized the need for a more streamlined and systematic approach to ensure that the most promising ideas could be swiftly identified and supported.
The first step in this transformation focused on ensuring that each topic of interest was relevant to the organization, with a particular emphasis on identifying the scientific merit behind the proposals. This due diligence involved assessing the novelty of each topic through a deep dive into current academic literature, technological challenges, and alignment with organizational goals. The team compared each proposal against a template to assess its uniqueness and relevance, leveraging academic databases to find related publications.
The Ideateplus team was tasked with automating the traditionally manual screening process that technical directors employed when reviewing proposals. This led to the creation of a global approach to proposal approvals, encompassing a broad range of disciplines and sectors.
Another key area of focus was the authors themselves. The platform introduced an evaluation of an author’s background, scrutinizing their publication records, expertise, affiliations, collaborations, and overall credibility in the field. By examining citations, awards, and grants, the system could better gauge the potential impact of a proposed project.
The process culminated in the creation of a Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) summary, which concisely distilled the most critical aspects of each proposal. This summary was coupled with a comprehensive simulation report, automatically generated by the platform’s advanced algorithms. The report provided an in-depth analysis of the proposal, offering key insights into its feasibility, alignment with organizational goals, and potential for impact. The Challenge Champion, tasked with making final decisions on which ideas to advance, could dive deeper into the analysis, either through automated interactions with the platform’s AI assistant or by manually reviewing the detailed data. This level of flexibility ensured that decision-makers had access to both high-level overviews and detailed breakdowns, streamlining the selection process.
By integrating AI-driven insights, customized evaluator inputs, and real-time simulation capabilities, the platform enabled a more thorough and objective evaluation of each submission. The system’s automation not only reduced the workload on human evaluators but also enhanced the quality of analysis, ensuring that only the most relevant and impactful ideas progressed.
This foundational process paved the way for the platform’s expansion into more advanced functionalities, which ultimately transformed the way proposals were analyzed and funded. By automating key aspects of the proposal evaluation, the platform reduced bottlenecks in the decision-making process and provided a clear, data-driven pathway for selecting promising ideas. This holistic approach ensured that both solicited and unsolicited proposals were assessed with precision and care, maximizing the potential for breakthrough innovations to emerge across various disciplines and sectors. The platform’s efficiency and analytical depth empowered the Challenge Champion and their team to confidently move forward with the best, most innovative solutions.
The Pitch Evaluation Platform
The PEP stands at the forefront of revolutionizing idea assessment and funding. Designed to streamline the review and selection process for organizational challenges, this platform transforms how both solicited and unsolicited submissions are managed. By ensuring that only the most promising ideas are funded, it fosters significant advancements across science, technology, and various other sectors.
As we’ve seen, at the heart of this solution is the AI-Driven Idea Insights feature, which employs advanced artificial intelligence to thoroughly analyze each submission. This AI-driven analysis is complemented by a Diverse Evaluator Nomination process, ensuring a broad spectrum of perspectives are involved in the evaluation. Together, these elements guarantee a comprehensive and well-rounded assessment of proposals, enabling informed decision-making.
The platform’s Advanced AI Analysis and Scoring System takes the evaluation process even further. This sophisticated tool provides a deep, data-driven screening of ideas and generates comprehensive scores based on a variety of criteria. The meticulous scoring process ensures that only the strongest and most promising proposals advance to the next phase.
In addition to AI analysis, the platform also offers an In-depth Analysis and Evaluation Summary. This feature highlights the highest-scoring pitches and provides creators with customized evaluation summaries. These summaries are vital for giving critical insights and feedback, helping innovators refine and enhance their ideas. This step is instrumental in identifying and promoting the most viable and innovative concepts.
ONRG’s Global X 2024 Challenge: A Successful Pilot of the Pitch Evaluation Platform
The Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG) took on the role of an initial stakeholder, piloting the Pitch Evaluation Platform with its prestigious Global X 2024 Challenge. This initiative, which sought to uncover innovative solutions to complex naval and defense challenges, provided the ideal environment to test the platform’s capabilities. During the pilot phase, ONRG utilized the platform’s advanced features to streamline the proposal review process. Following a focused design sprint and a successful proof-of-concept, the platform demonstrated its ability to provide richer insights and a fraction of the time, compared to ONRG’s traditional evaluation methods, while arriving at comparable conclusions to the manual evaluations conducted by human reviewers. This success validated the platform’s effectiveness in handling complex, high-stakes challenges.
The pilot program revealed the true potential of the Pitch Evaluation Platform in optimizing the proposal selection process. The automation and AI-driven insights allowed evaluators to review submissions with greater efficiency and precision, significantly reducing the time required for in-depth analysis. By mimicking the conclusions drawn from ONRG’s manual assessments, the platform proved that it could effectively assess the relevance, novelty, and impact of innovative proposals. This result not only affirmed the platform’s analytical capabilities but also demonstrated how it could enhance future evaluation processes, providing a reliable and scalable solution for large-scale challenges like Global X.
With this success under its belt, the Pitch Evaluation Platform is now positioned to play a pivotal role in shaping how future ideas are evaluated and funded. The platform’s ability to handle both solicited and unsolicited proposals, combined with its rigorous AI-driven analysis, makes it a valuable tool for advancing innovation in a variety of fields.
As ONRG continues to create future Open Challenges, the Pitch Evaluation Platform has proven itself as a game-changing solution, streamlining the process of identifying and advancing groundbreaking ideas. By successfully addressing the issue of overwhelming proposal submissions, the platform has demonstrated its ability to enhance decision-making, ensuring that the most promising solutions receive the necessary attention and resources to succeed.
With ONRG’s validation of its capabilities through the Global X 2024 Challenge, the Pitch Evaluation Platform sets a new standard in innovation evaluation and funding. This success paves the way for other organizations to adopt this transformative tool, revolutionizing how they approach idea assessment and funding across diverse sectors.
