Opening Data to Innovation: stories, takeaways and twists

By drawing on examples from Britain, America’s Pacific Northwest, and Japan, this article explores how data can drive innovation. Cross-silo collaborations can help organizations get inventive about how they make meaning from data and use insights to create valuable new products, services, and processes. Some data is proprietary, while other data is open and available, but using data for innovation often means opening it by asking questions and seeing what insights the answers communicate. The article dives into three groups of stories: visitor patterns that drove simple website redesign, social data that revealed peer behaviors in useful ways, and crowdfunding that helps measure demand. The key takeaways are that people matter more than numbers, data must illuminate people’s experience, and no rigid data structures can constrain great innovation.