Today, many companies realize that Big Data analytics holds many answers and drives innovation, along with finding hidden correlations and identifying patterns. The power of Big Data leads to the development of predictive analytics that can predict future behaviors and trends both inside and outside of your company. Big data can provide you with answers to the questions such as “What will our customers want next?”, “Is there a need for a new feature of the existing product?” or even “What are the future trends in your industry?”. All these questions and their answers should be interlinked with your innovation management. The answers provided correlate directly with the data required for successful innovation and improve innovation capacity.

McKinsey Global Institute study on Big Data reveals several ways of how Big Data can bring value to a number of industries and verticals:

• Big Data can unlock business value by making information transparent and usable at a much higher frequency;
• Organizations can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore boost performance;
• Big Data allows narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services;
• Advanced data analytics can fundamentally improve decision-making;
• Big Data can be used to advance the development of the next generation of products and services.

If you look closely, the above-mentioned advantages of Big Data usage represent the points of intersection between Big Data and Innovation Management. The increasing volume of data being captured and analyzed by the company is a valuable fuel for the company innovation management. By integrating Big Data to your innovation management, the organization has an opportunity to interconnect and analyze all data and thus identify customer needs, new markets, and business opportunities at an early stage of the innovation process. The results of the process are educated decisions obtaining and enhancing foresight, product development, customer experience, operational efficiency and other innovation outcomes.

For example, Google is No 1. Expert in processing Big Data and the outcome of the process improves the understanding of users’ desires. Why are we presented with the most suitable answers, ranked in terms of relevance and geography, when asking a question on Google? Thanks to big data analytics!

In addition, Big Data analytics can find new patterns and opportunities. Health care providers can use Big Data to analyze the state of various patients, their medical conditions, and treatments. Thereby, they can determine the best treatment for each individual patient based on factors like age, sex, location, and food. The possibilities of Big Data analytics can lead to spectacular innovations that can save lives and change the world for the better.

Additional Big Data performance usage are listed below:

• Big Data can help organizations drive innovation by analyzing the interdependencies among people, information, processes and markets, and then by providing new ways of the insight usage.
• Big Data analytics gives you the opportunity to analyze and assess production data to improve operational efficiency.
• By analyzing and comparing attributes and performances of past and current products/services, you can pinpoint the weak spots and make room for their improvements.
• By analyzing the entire datasets from the customers, the employees will be able to create better decision-making processes. Companies like Netflix and Facebook use Big Data to anticipate customer demand and adjust their products and services accordingly.

How can innovation management software structure the Big Data workflow?

Innovation management software is a tool that supports your innovation process by providing one central place to collect, develop and implement ideas. As the innovation process is similar to any other business process, it needs a proper structure to support all innovation activities from the moment the idea is created until the moment the innovation is launched to the market.

The main advantage of innovation management software regarding Big Data analytics is the automation of various processes. Innovation management software will assist you in structuring Big Data by automating:

• Idea generation processes from your employees, customers, partners, stakeholders and online community;
• Integration of your existing business processes such as CRM, ERPs for better decision-making;
• Connected workflow and data of all your innovation projects at every stage - ranging from ideation and development to implementation and post-launch review;
• Advanced Analytics gathering from different data sources for the purpose of creating educated decision-making.

Your innovation management software should be able to keep track of Big Data required for successful innovation. It will help you to save a lot of time by analyzing huge amounts of data fast and providing a comprehensive overview of all innovation-related data.

The one question remains: Have you introduced Big Data to your innovation management?