In May a few years ago, an electric transmission line owned by the local power company failed. A span of line that had been installed a quarter of a century before and spliced numerous times over the years finally gave way and fell. The resulting fire consumed 1100 acres, including the plaintiff’s home. He lost tools, furnishings, and many personal belongings. Defense attorneys had asked the judge to dismiss the case. This is when the plaintiff’s attorney contacted Intota to find an expert in electrical line accidents and safety requirements. The expert was called on to rebut the defendant’s experts’ reports Read the rest of this entry »
Taking on the Electric Company
May 9th, 2013Did you hear the one about two attorneys who went into a bar?
May 6th, 2013Opposing counsels were traveling to depose an Intota expert. The case involved a particular type of food poisoning and plaintiff counsel had retained an Intota expert to review and report about the histamine content of the food. The two attorneys ended up—by some wild stretch of coincidence—using the same exact travel itinerary and both missed a connecting flight in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul airport. They adjourned to an airport bar for a couple of drinks and dinner. Apparently, conversation turned to the case. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Technology Push to Identify Adjacent Market Opportunities (Adjacencies, part III)
April 22nd, 2013In this final post on leveraging experts to find adjacent market opportunities, I want to talk about a technique called Technology Push which is used to find new customer segments. Your company may have produced a novel technology that gives you a competitive edge, saves your customers money and provides great margin. But where else can it be deployed? Can you expand its application to other markets and uses? Read the rest of this entry »
Intota’s Intellectual (Property) Depth and Breadth
April 4th, 2013How can you undercover the most effective expert for your intellectual property cases? Look at recent and remote history!
Recent History:
Over the past 12 months, we have supplied experts for Read the rest of this entry »
Intota Experts Stepping up to the Problem of Beefy Bacteria
March 25th, 2013The EU has a beef with bacteria hitching a ride on cow skins and contaminating beef at slaughterhouses. It’s been that pesky e. coli bacteria that has caused a variety of havoc over the past years here in the states (see here and here for examples) and continues to make us question our food safety. Leafy greens have been the more famous culprits of late; however meat has been a perennial favorite source for many years.
After much research, the EU funded ProsafeBeef has come up with an idea that could stop one transmission mechanism for this pathogen – douse the beef carcass before it is skinned with shellac! Your home furniture improvement project old standby now moves into the 21st century.
Youris.com is sort of a news service for EU funded research. Recently, they tapped two Intota experts Read the rest of this entry »
Biostatistic Experts in False Advertising Litigation
January 29th, 2013Okay – I knew that biostatistics was a widely used expertise in litigating product liability/mass torts. With all the clinical data brought to bear in these cases, the statistical arguments can be quite dense (in the positive sense of the word, of course!) and quite important to determining the facts of the matter. Statistical methods are used to organize and interpret whether clinical trials have proven the efficacy of a drug or nutritional supplement. If the clinical trial data is shown to be lacking – then the product could not only be shown to be inadequate or even injurious, but also the level to which parties understood this liability.
BUT, what is new to me is the use of biostatistics in false advertising litigation. Read the rest of this entry »
BUT, what is new to me is the use of biostatistics in false advertising litigation. Read the rest of this entry »
Leveraging Experts and Lead User Forums (Adjacencies, part II)
December 19th, 2012This is part two of a three part series from guest blogger, Brian Reuter, Managing Director ORC International
In the last post I talked about leveraging subject matter experts to assist in identifying and qualifying adjacent market
opportunities. In this post I want to discuss how to find, qualify and work with experts and lead users to that end using the concept of a forum or specialized focus group.
Leading innovators know that they can increase the business impact of innovation by injecting an external perspective
during idea generation and evaluation. By leveraging the knowledge of industry experts and lead users you can quickly hone in on industry, customer and technical trends that can lead to adjacent moves with the greatest commercial promise.
One way to do this is through expert and lead users forums (see here and here). By leveraging the insights from multiple experts Read the rest of this entry »
It is all about the weather
November 1st, 2012Frankenstorm has dramatically and painfully shaken us and reminded us we are humans. For those of us not digging out of a collapsed building or dodging fallen trees, the effects are present, if at one remove. ORC International’s US offices have limited connectivity – the network hub folks are working to restore service to many folks in New Jersey and New York and we are on that list. Intota is up and running, but we are on our cell phones and gmail accounts.
Since I cannot connect to some of the other aspects of my work, I am scanning the blogosphere and reading the news more thoroughly. And blogs and news reports are talking about how the storm affects those things near and dear to each individual’s concerns ala Maslow’s Pyramid. I am no different; shelter and primary concerns taken care of (I am in Minnesota) so now I am looking at how the closure of many corporate offices and State and Federal courts affects our Expert business. I see legal blogs talking about litigation that may arise from this catastrophe while the news talks about the storm’s impact on Presidential campaigning, FEMA and politics in general, in addition to reporting on the more pressing news about how people are coping.
Here is a summary of randomly gathered stories: Read the rest of this entry »
