Managing the Business of Innovation
MindMatters Technologies has developed Innovator™ Enterprise Management System software, which provides advanced oversight and management of the corporate innovation process. Additionally, the Innovator has integrated functionality that provides unsurpassed safeguarding and protection of emerging intellectual property assets. Innovator helps companies to

• Generate growth opportunities and new sources of revenue through innovation
• Accelerate the innovation process, allowing new products and services to be commercialized more quickly and effectively
• Realize the potential of breakthrough innovations

A venture-backed, enterprise software organization headquartered in Pittsburgh, MindMatters was founded in February 2000 by seasoned executives with engineering and business development backgrounds from such organizations as IBM, GE, and Carnegie Mellon. In December 2000, MindMatters announced completion of a first round of equity financing totaling $1.0 million. The first round was led by Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds, a prominent seed/early stage investor with $200 million currently under management and 15 years of experience. Considering the declining economic conditions of the latter part of 2000, especially in the venture capital community, this was a major endorsement of the company's technologies, capabilities and business potential.

In developing the architecture for Innovator™, MindMatters completed extensive, first-hand research by visiting and performing executive needs assessments with dozens of organizations ranging in size from 100 employees to Fortune 5, academic institutions, Intellectual Property law firms, and human resource organizations. These results along with substantial marketing research provided a strong substantiation that today, the knowledge capture process, particularly for novel inventions and intellectual property, is highly paper-intensive, manually-oriented, and often poorly defined. Also, with intellectual capital assets comprising more of a company's valuation today than ever before, it has become increasingly important to manage emerging innovations carefully.

In July 2001, the company announced that it completed initial implementation of the first version of the Innovator at PPG Industries, a global supplier of coatings, chemicals, glass and fiberglass, with more than 120 manufacturing facilities worldwide and 2000 revenues of $8.6 billion. Today, the latest version of the Innovator is deployed to approximately 20,000 users and has been proven across a variety of departments, business processes and geographies nationally, and internationally.

Today, we can stand proud that we have a growing client list of premier, world-class companies using the solution we created for the most essential, growth-focused business process that exists today. These are incredible accomplishments for a company of less than four years, and a real testament to the dedication, capacity and superb capabilities of our team.