Development of a natural language analysis algorithm for the open innovation team

Worldwide innovation leader

Électricité de France (EDF) is the largest French electric utility company, quoted at the Paris stock exchange since 2005. EDF operates a diverse portfolio of 120+ gigawatts of generation capacity in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. EDF is active in production, distribution, and services in the energy field.

EDF is the second world's largest producer of electricity with a production of 580TWh. In 2011, it produced 22% of the European Union's electricity, primarily from nuclear power.

Innovation context

In the context of the energy transition, EDF aims to become an efficient and responsible electricity company that champions low-carbon growth. It is the group’s response to its new customers’ challenges and demands. The EDF’s 2030 strategic focus is to create new, competitive decentralized solutions, new personalized energy services, and smart grids to support customers and regions through their energy transition.

Research and development

In this context, EDF gave Raisup the challenge, to automatically classify startups according to their technologies, market, and use-cases based on their description. EDF also wanted to complement its qualitative analyses of trends in technologies, by determining with facts, and a quantitative approach, what were the new trends, by looking at the description of newly created startups in a given quarter in the world. Raisup raised to the challenge and working together as a team with EDF  Open Innovation, succeeded in finding the right algorithms, and the training models which EDF worked on for a mutually beneficial result.