Retrospective Subject: A matchmaking project in which a manufacturing enterprise sought university experts to solve a production line process problemRetrospective Time: Three months after the matchmaking was completedConclusion First: The key turning point of this project was that screening was done before the meeting.
Background
This problem had been tackled internally for six months, and we decided to seek university collaboration. There had been two failed matchmaking attempts before: one was in the wrong field, and the conversation stalled within half an hour of meeting; the other party had never done industry-university-research collaboration and had no interest in engaging. The core reason for both failures was the same—before making contact, we knew almost nothing about the candidate experts.
Process
This time, the process was rearranged. Four steps were completed in sequence before the meeting:
1. Deconstruct the problem—translate the process bottleneck into research fields and keywords, turning it into searchable language;
2. Field search—use MuchSci's talent profiles to search experts by field, and first use database-scale statistics to understand how large the candidate pool is;
3. Two filters—the first filters for aligned research direction (looking at keywords and disciplines in project details), the second filters for traces of industry-university-research collaboration (looking at project types and undertaking institutions); all details were double-verified through "exact name matching + institution verification";
4. Matchmaking with materials—profiles, verification details, and collaboration basis analysis were organized into factual materials.
Matchmaking result: substantive discussion began on the first visit, and an intention to collaborate was reached within two weeks.
Reflection
Question 1: What did screening people first save? It saved ineffective visits. By screening on both direction and traces, the candidate pool was narrowed from "a batch of names" to "two or three people"—based on last time's experience, if these two or three people had relied on blind visits, the cost would have been at least three times higher.
Question 2: What did the materials change? The opening line. It changed from "we came because of your reputation" to "we saw in public data that you undertook a certain project in a certain year, and it matches our problem exactly." It took the expert only ten minutes to judge whether it was worth talking—when the words have a source, consensus comes faster.
Question 3: What did the boundary preserve? The tool did not provide a recommended list throughout; the judgment was left to the enterprise. Looking back, this instead ensured the sincerity of the matchmaking—the screening was done by ourselves, and both the responsibility and the motivation rested with us.