Top innovations at RELX
Helping our customers change the world
Innovation is not always an ’aha moment’. More often than not, it is a journey in problem-solving usually among people with different expertise and different points of view.
In part two, we look at five more innovations at RELX that are the fruit of collective genius and that are helping to change the world.
The other parts of this story are now available below.
“Innovation is not about solo genius..."
"...it’s about collective genius.”
1Transforming medical learning with 3D anatomy: Elsevier's Complete Anatomy
For over 200 years, the medical profession has taught medicine using flat books and images. Enter 3D technology and suddenly anatomy can be visualised and medical learning is transformed.
“We try to shift the centuries-old way of learning anatomy into the 21st century,” says Irene Walsh, chief design officer at 3D4Medical, part of Elsevier.
Complete Anatomy is the world’s most advanced cloud-based 3D anatomy platform. This ground-breaking 3D medical technology disrupts traditional methods of education by providing revolutionary applications that allow the educator, student, healthcare professional and patient to explore and experience medical education like never before, putting high-quality accessible 3D anatomical information at their fingertips.
Irene Walsh explains: “So you press something on a radiological image, which is essentially opaque and hard to interpret, and the software automatically relates it to a specific part of the 3D model.” Part of Walsh's focus is now on augmented reality. “We’re exploring how we can deliver something like a cadaveric dissection remotely,” she adds. Elsevier’s other medical technology projects include a clinical trial data capture tool, which has been released for free to Covid-19 researchers, and a life sciences platform that brings together pharmaceutical data to de-silo knowledge. Second-opinion machines that advise doctors in real-time are on the horizon.
3D4Medical regularly claims the title of number one medical app on the app stores of Apple, Microsoft and Google in 160 countries and currently counts 1.9m members in its community.
2Improving the legal research experience: How LexisNexis' Lexis+ is transforming the legal practice, step by step
The legal profession is going through a profound technological transformation that has accelerated with the pandemic. Law firms and corporate counsel are under increasing pressure to deliver higher-quality advice and services at lower cost in what is already a competitive market.
“Because the practice of law is changing so rapidly now, and because more and more people are relying on data to make really important legal and business decisions, the quality and quantity of data matters tremendously,” says Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional.
Developed with feedback from 2,000 customer interactions, LexisNexis Legal & Professional created Lexis+, a premium legal solution that combines legal research, practical guidance, brief analysis and litigation analytics into a single offering.
“Lexis+ was designed for the ways that attorneys work, with deeply integrated product components, cutting-edge technologies and modern design elements that put the LexisNexis applications, content and data that attorneys need right at their fingertips. Regardless of where or how a user starts a research or task, they will be guided to the information that best addresses their legal question,” says Jeff Pfeifer, chief product officer at LexisNexis North America. “By taking a customer-centric approach to product development and emphasizing modern design, Lexis+ delivers a premium legal research experience that is both powerful, intuitive and easy to use.”
Among its features is litigation analytics based on technology from LexisNexis’ flagship analytics company, Lex Machina. These features bring high-level analytics into the Lexis+ workflow. Lex Machina continues to lead the field as the premier analytics product with comprehensive case resolutions, damages, remedies and findings to land more clients and win more cases.
3Providing innovators with contextualised and evidence-based IP insights and analytics
PatentSight+ is the leading analytics platform to support strategic decision-making. It enables the evaluation of patent quality and the benchmarking of patent portfolios.
The software provides insights on where to focus, enables innovators to report on the development of their patent portfolio and benchmarks against competitors.
LexisNexis PatentSight+ software features scientifically proven quality metrics and the well-presented analytics create transparency in the ever-increasing mass of global patent applications. The Patent Asset Index methodology featured in the software, differentiates high-value patents from low-value patents – empowers clients to make sense of the vast volumes of patent data in existence so that they can become more efficient and use data-driven insights to guide their decisions. Users can analyse the portfolios of their competitors, suppliers and customers and track the presence of new industry players. This helps them to spot gaps in the market and to identify early on any disruptive technologies that might create a risk to their business or present new opportunities.
PatentSight+ already features machine learning and AI-powered technology classification and will soon provide further AI-supported features developed in close collaboration with customers and interested parties. This next generation of AI-powered IP analytics is designed to further strengthen the work of IP professionals by enabling faster speed to insight and expanding the range of business-relevant information made available by the IP team.
4Advancing data-driven research in life sciences: How Elsevier’s Entellect platform allowed a drug repurposing datathon to discover new therapies for a rare disease
Bringing a new drug to the market takes ten or more years with a success rate of about 5 percent. Discovering treatment for patients with rare diseases is even harder. About 7,000 rare diseases affect more than 300m people worldwide, but nearly 95 percent have no treatment options. Chronic pancreatitis, which affects about 1m people globally is one such rare and painful disease with no current cure.
Elsevier, with its vast stores of drug data and artificial intelligence technologies, including Entellect, an AI-powered life sciences platform, teamed up with non-profit organisations, industry and academic partners, as well as researchers across the globe, to find drugs already in existence that could be repurposed to treat the rare disease. The company hosted a datathon collaboration ‘Repurposing Drugs for Rare Diseases’ with non-profit organisations, life sciences and technology companies and academia.
The datathon leveraged Elsevier’s expertise, with Entellect as the underpinning AI platform. Datathon participants were able to combine data from Elsevier’s life sciences products (including Reaxys) and also upload their own datasets into the Entellect platform. This process established an integrated and structured database with clean, normalised and relevant content with which advanced predictive analytics, machine learning and statistical techniques can be performed. This process is fundamental to a successful drug repurposing strategy.
Entellect breaks down data silos in a frictionless integration process to form a comprehensive database. After text and data mining, the integrated content is tagged and organised to ensure accurate and relevant searches. Advanced processing of content against established taxonomies and ontologies builds the rich knowledge graph.
After 60 days of intense work, the datathon revealed four drugs that could potentially be repurposed to treat chronic pancreatitis. These drugs were validated by independent experts and are now in clinical testing.
5Supporting business with digital products to enhance events: RX's online product showcases
Covid-19 created unprecedented challenges to event organisers whose business model is built around gathering people together; but the pandemic has also forced the industry to wake up to an opportunity that has for too long laid dormant. That is, the potential for digital technology and data to enrich the experience, and extend the reach, of traditional face-to-face events.
When the pandemic struck in early 2020, RX adopted a ‘stay in the market, support customers, and iterate and learn’ approach. Rapidly, it was able to develop and roll-out products that can augment face-to-face events, and that can support the many companies who rely on exhibitions to network, showcase products and generate sales leads. For many companies, exhibitions are a big part of their marketing strategy. One of these products, which was accelerated along the development pipeline in direct response to customer needs, is online product showcases.
An online product showcase is a virtual opportunity for an exhibitor to give product demos and present new launches via webinar presentations to pre-targeted audiences of remote buyers, before, during and after physical and fully virtual events. Product showcases can be streamed live or pre-recorded and after a live showcase is finished, they are available to attendees on-demand, year-round on the event’s digital platform. It allows exhibitors to extent their global reach to showcase their product and brand with high impact content and helps to drive attendee interest and engagement with exhibitors both during the online session and throughout the sales cycle. Helping exhibitors to improve sales and return on investment.
In 2020, over 100 online product showcases were created as part of RX's digital offering for virtual events. For example, the Airport Show held in December 2020 offered a content hub, including online product showcases to enable customers to view demos of the latest cutting-edge technologies showcasing the future of airport innovations. Similarly, Nepcon Live, a two-day event for the electronics manufacturing industry featured 37 product-orientated webinars and attracted over 8,000 live and on-demand views.
RX is expanding its digital offering and has formed a global digital centre of excellence to accelerate adoption. ”Our global research has shown that both our visitors and exhibitors are increasingly comfortable using digital products to enhance their event experience. Our goal now is to make them available at speed and scale. Our digitally augmented events are going to come back bigger, stronger, better – that’s our short term goal. But our long term vision is to engage our communities with digital content and services that drive year-round innovation and business. That’s what success looks like in our book,” says Brian Brittain, chief operating officer at RX.
RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.
We help scientists make new discoveries, doctors and nurses improve the lives of patients and lawyers win cases. We prevent online fraud and money laundering, and help insurance companies evaluate and predict risk. Our events enable customers to learn about markets, source products and complete transactions. In short, we enable our customers to make better decisions, get better results and be more productive.
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