Bridging the Institutional Babel Problem
Connect(or) is an AI-supported platform that translates complex challenges and expertise across disciplinary and organizational boundaries — and assembles complementary interdisciplinary teams based on skills, roles, experience, and project needs.
The Challenge
"Teams are assembled by proximity and accident — not by complementarity."
When Brilliant Minds Can't Find Each Other
Universities, employers, and innovation ecosystems hold extraordinary depth of expertise and face genuinely complex challenges. Yet disciplinary silos, organizational boundaries, and incompatible vocabularies conspire to keep the right people apart.
A materials scientist and a public health researcher may be working on adjacent problems without ever knowing it. An employer's innovation challenge may be perfectly matched to a university lab — but neither speaks the other's language.
This is the institutional Babel problem: not a lack of talent or ambition, but a failure of translation and connection at scale.
"Some of the big challenges that we face, both societal and scientific, are just not solvable by people sitting in their single-discipline silos — bringing those disciplines together in the long term is what provides the big, big breakthroughs."
— Noémi Nagy, Ph.D.
Why it matters
Connect(or) enables people to work in ways that fit them best, so they collaborate better, stay engaged, and perform at their best.
Because people do their best when they want to work together.
The Platform
A Translation Layer for Human Expertise
Connect(or) combines organizational psychology, network science, and human-centered AI to bridge the gaps that institutions cannot bridge alone.
Translation Engine
AI that maps challenges and expertise across disciplinary vocabularies — surfacing connections that keyword matching and keyword search cannot find.
Team Assembly
Matches people by skills, roles, experience, work preferences, availability, and project needs — assembling teams for complementarity, not just availability.
Network Intelligence
Draws on organizational psychology and network science to optimize team composition — accounting for collaboration dynamics, not just individual credentials.
Applications
Built for the Institutions That Drive Innovation
Connect(or) is designed for the institutions and ecosystems where interdisciplinary collaboration matters most — and where the cost of getting it wrong is highest.
Vertical 01
Universities
Research universities sit on vast reserves of expertise — but disciplinary silos, departmental boundaries, and institutional complexity make that expertise nearly invisible to the people who need it most.
Interdisciplinary Research & Education
Interdisciplinary Research Teams
Identify faculty, postdocs, and graduate students whose expertise, methods, and interests align across departments — enabling research collaborations that would never surface through conventional search.
Grant Team Assembly
Rapidly assemble the right combination of investigators for complex, multi-PI proposals. Connect(or) maps expertise to funding opportunity requirements and surfaces complementary collaborators.
Student–Faculty Matching
Connect students to faculty mentors, research labs, and project teams based on skills, learning goals, and research interests — not just department affiliation or who they happen to know.
Cross-Institutional Partnerships
Discover expertise and potential collaborators at partner institutions, consortia, and research networks — enabling the kind of boundary-spanning collaboration that produces breakthrough science.
Cross-Functional Project Teams
Move beyond org charts and job titles to assemble project teams based on actual skills, working styles, and collaboration histories — the factors that predict team performance.
Internal Expertise Discovery
Surface hidden expertise distributed across business units, geographies, and roles. Connect(or) makes the knowledge inside your organization visible and actionable at scale.
Innovation Challenge Teams
Assemble diverse, high-potential teams for internal innovation programs, hackathons, and R&D sprints — with team compositions informed by research on what makes innovation teams effective.
Talent Matching Beyond Titles
Identify employees whose skills, interests, and potential fit emerging project needs — enabling talent mobility and development that conventional HR systems cannot support.
Vertical 02
Employers & Industry
Organizations invest heavily in talent — but struggle to mobilize it effectively. The expertise they need is often already inside the organization, invisible and underutilized.
Cross-Functional Innovation
Vertical 03
Innovation Ecosystems
Accelerators, I-Corps cohorts, public-private partnerships, and regional innovation networks all depend on the quality of the teams they form. Connect(or) makes team formation a strength, not a bottleneck.
Accelerators, Cohorts & Partnerships
Accelerator & I-Corps Cohorts
Form high-potential venture teams from cohort participants whose skills, domain expertise, and entrepreneurial orientations complement each other — improving team quality and cohort outcomes.
Hackathon & Challenge Teams
Move beyond self-selection to assemble challenge teams that are genuinely diverse in expertise and perspective — the combination most likely to produce novel, viable solutions.
Public–Private Partnerships
Identify the right institutional and industry partners for complex, multi-sector initiatives — matching organizational capabilities to project requirements across sector boundaries.
Ecosystem Expertise Mapping
Build a living map of expertise, capability, and collaboration potential across an entire regional or thematic innovation ecosystem — enabling smarter investment and partnership decisions.
Competitive Advantages
What Makes Connect(or) Different
Interdisciplinary Translation
Goes beyond keyword matching to map expertise and challenges across disciplinary vocabularies — finding connections that conventional search cannot surface.
Grounded in Research
Built on organizational psychology and network science, not intuition. Team composition recommendations are informed by decades of research on collaboration and team dynamics.
Human-Centered AI
Augments human judgment rather than replacing it. Connect(or) surfaces possibilities and patterns — people make the decisions.
Proven Methodology
Builds on the award-winning Hackateams concept, a validated predecessor approach to interdisciplinary team formation.
Patent-Protected Approach
The Connect(or) approach is protected through a provisional patent application filed under the University of South Florida.
Research Foundation
Grounded in Decades of Research
Connect(or) is not a product built on intuition. Every design decision traces back to a body of peer-reviewed research spanning three disciplines — and to years of applied practice through the Hackateams methodology.
Organizational Psychology
Team composition, collaboration dynamics, and the science of how people work together effectively across boundaries.
Research on team cognition, transactive memory systems, and psychological safety establishes that effective interdisciplinary teams require more than complementary skills — they require shared mental models, role clarity, and trust built across difference. Connect(or) encodes these principles into its matching and assembly logic.
Network Science
Graph theory, structural holes, and the mathematics of how expertise and information flow through institutional networks.
Burt's structural holes theory demonstrates that the most valuable connectors in any network are those who bridge otherwise disconnected clusters. Connect(or) applies network-theoretic principles to identify not just who has relevant expertise, but who occupies positions that enable cross-boundary translation and brokerage.
Human-Centered AI
AI systems designed to augment human decision-making — transparent, interpretable, and aligned with human values and judgment.
Human-centered AI design principles — interpretability, human oversight, and value alignment — are foundational to Connect(or)'s architecture. The platform surfaces possibilities and patterns; it does not make decisions for people. Every recommendation is designed to be explainable and contestable.
From Research to Platform
Connect(or) is the direct expression of years of original research and practice in interdisciplinary collaboration, team formation, and organizational dynamics. That work found an earlier application in Hackateams — a recognized concept for structured team assembly — but the intellectual foundation has always been the research itself: the publications, the frameworks, the lived experience of building and studying teams across boundaries.
The platform is not derived from a prior product. It is the research, now given infrastructure.
Key Academic Foundations
Burt, R. S.(2004)
Structural Holes and Good Ideas
American Journal of Sociology
Granovetter, M.(1973)
The Strength of Weak Ties
American Journal of Sociology
Wegner, D. M.(1987)
Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind
Theories of Group Behavior
Edmondson, A. C.(1999)
Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams
Administrative Science Quarterly
Shneiderman, B.(2020)
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence: Reliable, Safe & Trustworthy
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
Nagy, N., Blaese, R., Appenzeller, J., Puumalainen, K., & Filser, M.(2025)
Platform business models: Identifying factors for rapid growth of newly founded companies
Review of Managerial Science
doiAliaga, A. A., Nagy, N., Gomez Torres, B., Mahmoud, A., & Callahan, C.(2026)
Strengthening Workforce Readiness: Evidence on Work Based Learning in U.S. Higher Education Cybersecurity Programs
Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy
doiWhere We Are
Where We Are Today
Hackateams Concept
CompleteAward-winning predecessor concept for interdisciplinary team formation — the research and methodology foundation for Connect(or).
Provisional Patent Filed
CompleteConnect(or) approach protected through a provisional patent application filed under the University of South Florida.
USF I-Corps Cohort
CompleteSelected for the University of South Florida's Fall 2026 Cybersecurity/AI I-Corps cohort — validating the commercial potential of the approach.
Research to Impact LLC
CompleteResearch to Impact LLC formed to support the future development and commercialization of Connect(or).
Platform Development
In ProgressConnect(or) platform is currently in active development. We are seeking partners, collaborators, and early adopters to shape its direction.
Get Involved
Shape the Future of Interdisciplinary Collaboration
We are actively seeking university leaders, industry partners, funders, developers, and collaborators to participate in customer-discovery interviews, pilot partnerships, and development opportunities. Your perspective will directly shape Connect(or).