Building MIT’s Innovation Metrics Platform with Advanced Data Assembling, Analysis, and Visualization for Strategic Insight
Angular 4|PostgreSQL|Ruby On Rails
Conclusion generation|Data Analysis|Data visualization|Web application development
The Client
The client, MIT’s Lab for Innovation Science, is a dedicated team of academics, professionals, and alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Directed by the Office of the Provost, the group is charged to create and expand MIT’s innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem, guiding innovations from idea inception to impactful real-world solutions. The MIT Office of Innovation supports, connects, and empowers the university’s community through advanced, data-informed initiatives.
Client Achievements:
The Challenge
The MIT Office of Innovation, through its MIT Lab, needed an advanced analytics platform to support student and researcher projects. This platform was intended to measure and visualize critical metrics related to innovation ecosystem dynamics. Specifically, MIT required tools to track and analyze data such as country indexes (e.g., GDP, population) and other metrics to understand the ecosystem’s impact over time. However, the existing system faced accessibility issues, data input challenges, and performance limitations, which affected its usability for ongoing research and upcoming classes. The challenge was to enhance this analytics platform, ensuring it could reliably process, store, and display data, enabling researchers to draw actionable insights on innovation trends within MIT and beyond.
What Was Done
The Ralabs team addressed a range of functional and technical issues to enhance MIT’s innovation metrics platform. We implemented a series of improvements that optimized system performance, enhanced usability, and expanded functionality to better meet the needs of MIT’s researchers and students.
Implemented Features:
Improved data visualizations that allow researchers to analyze metrics by country and year, generating insights into economic and innovation trends.
Provided admin users with tools to create, update, and manage country-specific metrics like population and GDP, ensuring the database remains relevant and up-to-date.
Enhanced the backend’s data handling capacity by refining SQL queries, ensuring faster response times for user queries and data visualization.
Adjusted the UI to support efficient navigation, including alphabetic sorting for country lists and year filters, for a more intuitive user experience.
Results
The updated platform enabled students and researchers to engage with the system without interruptions
Optimizations led to faster data load times, allowing users to access and analyze information more quickly
Administrators could now manage and update essential metrics, ensuring that the analytics platform reflected accurate and timely information
Research
Outcomes
With access to a strong set of analytics tools, MIT researchers gained a deeper understanding of innovation ecosystem trends, supporting informed decisions and strategic interventions
Tech Stack
Daniel
Head of Engineering at Ralabs
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