HAVAS 18 Labs: A Knowledge Graph for Innovation in the Media Industry

18 months may seem a short time in absolute terms but in the corporate world and especially when referring to entrepreneurship 18 months is usually a figure associated to life expectancy, with 80% technology startups crashing and burning in their first 18 months. HAVAS has launched 18 Innovation Labs, a global initiative aiming to identify startups in the intersection of technology and media, in order to co-create new ways to revolutionize the media and entertainment industry. HAVAS seeks to interconnect startups, innovators, technology trends, other companies, and universities worldwide in a Knowledge Graph that supports analytics and strategic decision-making for the incorporation of such talent within their 18 months life span. In this talk we describe the 18 Labs initiative, challenges, and business expectations and how semantic technologies are key for realizing this vision by extracting startup information from online sources, structuring and enriching it into an actionable, self-sustainable semantic dataset, and providing media businesses with strategic knowledge about the most trending innovations.