Over the past year TeamFit has developed a way to look into a company from the outside and see what skills may be present and how they are being applied.

This approach is an extension of our skill extraction technology that looks at things like résumés, project records, publications and certifications to understand what skills a person may have and to uncover potential skills.

Skill extraction applies a set of technologies to infer skills from multiple types of content and then applies semantic inference to work out the relationships between the skills and to build out the skill graph.Take a look at this video to see a demonstration in the context of client in differentiation. We used the iconic design firms IDEO and Frog Design as a test case. Included are a short interview with Brian Conlin, former CEO of Golder Associates and a leading advisor to professional services firms, on Client-In Skill Differentiation and the results of our comparison of IDEO and Frog Design.

These two companies are important in the design and innovation world. They are both leaders, do excellent work and have created iconic designs. They have helped to define how we think about design's business impact. For most of us they seem like very similar companies. Can you say how they are different?

We used skill extraction to build skill maps of each company and then look for similarities and differences. We also applied one of our analytical tools to see how projects organize into skill clusters (sets of projects that apply similar groups of skills). It is sometimes easier to compare these project clusters than to compare skills directly (we will be publishing a technical paper on this later this month).

All this work just gives us what Brian Conlin refers to as 'company out' differentiation. This is what you get when you compare two or more companies to each other. What really matters though is 'client-in' differentiation. Which company has the skill set that is most relevant to a specific project that a company may want to contract? Brian has written about this for us in his article "Client-In Strategic Differentiation."

We used our TeamBuilder tool to compare IDEO and Frog on two different projects.

The first was a project for a Mobile Internet of Things application. For this project IDEO outscored Frog.  

The second project was for a play space for disabled children. In this case, Frog Design is the better innovation partner.

We should be sceptical about these results of course. They are based on a limited set of public projects, only 30 for Frog and more than 100 for IDEO. We can get much deeper insights when we work directly with a company to build a dynamic skill map of its people, projects and teams. Most likely a full analysis of these companies with access to internal data would lead to higher scores. When companies have a skill gap one of the best ways to cover it is by partnering. We plan to extend this type of search so that it will not only find the best company for a project but the best pairs of company.

But even with this data important differences between companies are visible. We will continue to build up the TeamFit Skill Graph by looking at the public project records from many different sources.If you would like to get deep insight into your own company's skills contact us at info@teamfit.co. Skill insight is critical to understand critical business questions.

Do you have the skills needed to deliver on your goals?Where are there skill gaps and how you can cover them?Do you have hidden pockets of potential skills that could be better applied?Do you have the most effective allocation of skills to projects?