Presans

About the company

PRESANS is an open-innovation European company located in Paris. PRESANS, through its base line and service offering, claims to connect business and expertise by organizing worldwide calls for expertise and problem solving competitions in various industrial sectors such as

Clients include mostly large organizations, universities and research organizations (École Polytechnique, CNRS).

According to Michaël Haddad, Presans is part of the growing French "heart of the knowledge economy".

History

PRESANS was founded in 2008.

The company won the Innovation Prize of the École Polytechnique that was handed to the management by Nobel Prize Laureate Albert Fert.

Early in 2011, PRESANS launched an online version of the expert search engine X-Search. X-Search is comparable to other tools such as BiomedExperts developed by Collexis, in the sense that it allows identification of a large number of experts in the world. However, despite the large database announced by PRESANS, experts' profiles appear not to be as rich as that of BiomedExperts.

Information Retrieval for expert sourcing

As described in the book‚ A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, foreworded by Henry Chesbrough, PRESANS focuses on Expert Sourcing, rather than on crowdsourcing. For this purpose they have developed the approach called the Multistep Dynamic Expert Sourcing (MDES). According to the book and the publication referenced above, MDES relies on a combination between a web-mining technology, and a multistep problem solving process. In this approach, experts do not register, instead, the various digital tracks they leave on the web allow to detect and to invite them on-demand to tackle challenging technological problems.

For this purpose, PRESANS appears to have a Research and Development activity in computer science in the fields of information retrieval and data mining.