Understanding a company's real strengths and comparing them to competitors is a critical business task. Traditionally, this involves a systematic, often manual, process of comparing products, services, and processes with industry leaders to find ways to improve. This manual approach can be slow and challenging.

To address this, the Joint Innovation Hub (JIH) at the Fraunhofer ISI has developed a solution: the AWAIT tool. AWAIT stands for Automated Website Analysis for Innovative Technologies, and it's designed to make this process faster and more data driven.

What Is the AWAIT Tool?

At its core, AWAIT is an AI-driven, quantitative tool that provides a comprehensive analysis of a company's strategic focus and competencies based on the content of its website. It reads and analyzes a website to determine the company's positioning and level of engagement in key technology areas. This could include fields like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Cybersecurity, the Metaverse, Quantum Computing, etc. The tool's purpose is to look past marketing claims and provide a clear, evidence-based picture of a company's technological focus.

How Does It Work?

AWAIT uses a three-step methodology to turn a company's website into strategic insights. The process is designed to be thorough yet easy to understand.

• Step 1: Smart Scanning (Web Crawling): The process begins when the tool crawls a company's homepage. It scans all the subpages and uses a classification system to filter them, separating the relevant URLs from the irrelevant ones. Only the pages with meaningful content move on to the next step, ensuring the analysis is focused and accurate.
• Step 2: Finding the Keywords (Text Processing): Once the relevant pages are identified, AWAIT gets to work extracting all the text information. It then performs a keyword analysis to identify and count terms related to specific technologies and themes. At the same time, this text data is prepared in a format that a Generative AI can understand.
• Step 3: AI-Powered Analysis and Scoring: In the final step, a Generative AI analyzes the text. It doesn't just count keywords; it evaluates the context and depth of how they are used to determine a company's true level of engagement. Based on this analysis, the tool generates engagement scores for various topics and provides an explanation for each score. The results are then presented in clear visualizations, such as a spider diagram, making it easy to see a company's strengths briefly.

AWAIT in Action: Real-World Examples

To demonstrate how AWAIT works in practice, it was applied in a project for a client from the chemical cleaning industry. The company aimed to identify new growth markets and explore innovative applications for its existing technologies.

Using AWAIT, a systematic analysis was conducted across competitors’ websites, academic publications, and patent databases. The AI-powered keyword and context analysis helped uncover links between the company’s existing capabilities and potential markets that had not been considered before. One of the major findings revealed a promising new application for their technology in the aerospace sector - a significant and unexpected opportunity. This data-driven insight provided the client with a comprehensive competitor overview and valuable guidance for their future strategic direction.

In another application, AWAIT was used to analyse companies in the healthcare industry in Baden-Württemberg. The tool identified emerging innovation clusters and regional strengths.

A Look at Ourselves: The Fraunhofer Website

To make the tool's output even clearer, we used AWAIT to analyze the website of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. The resulting engagement graph (figure 2) and technology heatmap (figure 3) show the focus areas based on the website's content.