How Content Management Systems and Enterprise Search Promote Product Innovation

Who is doing it: BioMérieux, a global company that specializes in making disease diagnostic tools and detecting microorganisms in food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, is developing a system that will use search technology to help it automate early-stage research into new product areas.

How it works: The system, called Strategic Watch, would integrate an enterprise search engine with BioMérieux’s content management system (CMS), says Corporate VP and CIO Mojgan Lefebvre. Using search terms relevant to a new area of research, the engine will crawl both public and fee-based data sources daily and pull documents into BioMérieux’s repository. The point is to give company workers more time to analyze the data and determine a business case for new products, as compared to manually compiling information. BioMérieux hopes to have the first version of the system live by the end of this year.

Growth Potential: Vertical industries have long used specialty research firms that curate data, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a content management analyst with The Real Story Group. “It’s fairly new that people are trying to do that themselves.” Integrating search engines with CMSes is getting easier, thanks partly to capabilities offered by search and CMS vendors, and to simpler application programming interfaces from data providers.