While there might have been a time when people relied on serendipity to come up with new products, services, or ideas, the reality is that we don’t need to wait for lightning to strike when searching for innovations. In today’s day and age, we have a more reliable ally for our innovative processes. I’m talking about data.
The Value of Data-Driven Approaches for Innovation
Becoming data-driven has turned country wise email marketing list into an obsession for all kinds of companies. In fact, a recent executive survey from NewVantage Partners has shown that most mainstream businesses are making solid investments in big data and AI initiatives as a way to become more data-driven. In fact, 91.9% of those companies are accelerating the pace of their data-driven investments.
Such a massive interest in data-driven initiatives has a lot to do with the multiple benefits they bring, especially the agility they can offer when making business decisions. Executives also know that data-driven approaches can help them identify new opportunities and open new markets through relevant insights that are great for innovation. In fact, many refer to big data focused on innovation as “data-driven innovation” (DDI).
To put it simply, DDI refers to the diversity and inclusion in digital marketing practice of using trends, patterns, correlations, or insights found in data to develop innovative projects. Those projects could be anything from new products, processes, services, or systems that radically depart from their existing alternatives and that end up meeting a particular demand or solving an issue.
The way in which DDI works is fairly simple to understand but quite hard to master. Using large datasets composed of information from multiple sources, AI algorithms detect and pinpoint potential opportunities for businesses to innovate. That innovation can be external (such as a new product or service) or internal (such as a new workflow). After getting those insights, the company using DDI has to define how to better act on them.
How To Adopt Data-Driven Innovation
When you adopt data-driven resource data innovation, you can cast aside gut feelings and intuition and empower your whole company with powerful new tools to boost their innovation initiatives. With that, I’m certainly not saying that data-driven innovation will replace your team’s creativity with algorithms.
What I’m trying to say is that data-driven initiatives can greatly improve your innovation processes, fueling brainstorming sessions and your own instinct with insights you might otherwise have never considered. Naturally, you’ll need to understand how to combine both.