Research at HornTech

At scale, content delivery surfaces a pattern that is easy to miss one article at a time. When many organisations in the same field are served through the same delivery operations, their content begins to converge in meaning even when no two pieces share the same wording. Two articles can use entirely different sentences and still cover the same angles, follow the same structure, and land on the same points. This is semantic convergence, and it matters because it quietly erodes the distinctiveness that each organisation depends on. The tools available today for detecting overlap were built to compare words. They catch matching phrases and shared keywords, and they do that well. What they do not capture is the repetition of meaning across a large and growing body of delivered content, where the wording differs but the substance repeats. As delivery volume grows, this gap tends to widen rather than close.

We are preparing our first formal research programme to study this problem directly. Internally we refer to it as Project Motuhake. Motuhake is a te reo Māori word meaning distinct, separate, and independent, which reflects both what the research is meant to protect, the distinctiveness of each organisation's content, and the spirit in which we intend to pursue it as its own dedicated effort.

The programme would explore a set of open technical questions rather than a fixed product. It would investigate how the meaning of content might be represented in a way that stays stable as the delivered body of content grows without limit; how a system might generate its own constraints from what has already been delivered rather than relying on rules written by hand; how such a system could stay stable as those constraints accumulate; and how it might learn from human review over time. These remain open questions. We do not yet know how, or whether, each can be resolved, which is exactly why we intend to approach them as research.

This would be the first formal research programme in the company's history. We have grown as a delivery business, and the work we have done to date has been engineering and delivery rather than research. We are choosing to change that deliberately. We intend to become a long term investor in research, and we are building the internal capability to manage it well: how we frame questions, record what we learn, and keep research separate from day to day delivery. Project Motuhake is where that begins.