5 Ways to Leverage Data for Your Innovation Projects

With the digital revolution, it is estimated that more than 2.5 quintillion data points are generated per day. This data is a valuable source of information that businesses increasingly convert into insights, especially for innovation projects. It helps businesses understand their customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. Further, it allows them to identify new opportunities, trends, and challenges in the market.

By leveraging data, businesses measure the impact and effectiveness of their innovation efforts. The data for innovation allows them to optimize their processes and strategies to meet the ever-changing demands of the industry they operate in. For instance, Walmart’s data science and analytics department, Walmart Labs, analyzes data generated by its operations and customers. Intelligence based on this data helps it forecast sales, optimize inventory, and provide personalized recommendations for customers.

Also read: How Data-Driven Open Innovation Takes Your Business to the Next Level

5 Ways to Leverage Data for Your Innovation Projects

1. Identify customers’ pain points

Customers drive revenue for businesses, this is why it is important to identify and address their needs. By analyzing data from various sources, such as surveys, feedback, reviews, social media, and more, businesses gain these insights. It helps them understand what their target audience wants, likes, and dislikes, as well as expects of their products or services.

Making use of data to understand customers also allows businesses to tailor their solutions and deliver value to their customers. For example, American Express analyzed its database of over 100 million credit card holders to understand and predict their behavior. It analyzed data on spending patterns, preferences, and customer feedback. The generated insights allowed American Express to offer personalized products and services.

2. Test & Validate Ideas

Data-driven innovation allows organizations to test and validate ideas before launching them. This helps in measuring the impact and feasibility of the proposed solutions and simplifies design revisions based on feedback. For instance, Uber uses GPS, traffic conditions, driver availability, and customer behavior data to optimize their services. This way, it experiments with features and markets to quickly adapt to the changing customer needs and preferences.

The benefit of testing and validating ideas in innovation projects is in avoiding time and resource wastage. So, businesses get to focus on developing solutions that meet customer expectations, increasing customer satisfaction and revenue.

3. Optimize Processes & Workflows

Data for innovation helps in identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and waste in operations. PepsiCo, for example, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve and grow its supply chain. This data-driven optimization enables them to detect areas of inefficiency and ineffectiveness in their current processes and identify potential areas for improvement. This results in efficient workflows and better resource allocation.

By optimizing processes and workflows, businesses deliver better results for their customers as well as stakeholders. This also results in higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately driving sales and revenue for businesses, and ensuring a competitive advantage in the market.

4. Monitor & Evaluate Results

Tracking the progress and performance of the innovation projects using data enables agile business strategies. For example, Accenture collaborates with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to source data such as anonymized user data, market research, and public datasets. This helps them to provide and monitor solutions for its clients. Further, it assists them to evaluate the impact and outcomes of their innovation projects while delivering solutions that are customized to each client’s specific needs and challenges.

Leveraging data also enables businesses to measure customer satisfaction before and after new projects. This way, innovation data helps them in identifying and optimizing factors influencing customer satisfaction. It also allows comparing the results with the competitors and industry benchmarks. In a nutshell, using data to monitor and evaluate results ensures that innovation projects are effective and align with organizational goals.

Also read – 4 Reasons Why You Need to Measure Innovation Within Your Organization

5. Communicate & Collaborate with Stakeholders

While being a valuable asset for driving product development, data is also a useful tool for communication and collaboration. It allows businesses to share visions and goals backed by data-driven insights and findings with clients, partners, and team members. For this, they create engaging and informative charts, graphs, or dashboards to illustrate project progress and impact. Moreover, the evidence and logic behind decisions and actions create trust and bring transparency among stakeholders.

For example, Lego created a website that allows Lego community members to share their designs with each other and the company. And, when the support for a particular idea increases, the company evaluates and produces it under its label. This helps them to communicate and collaborate with their customers and deliver products that meet their needs and preferences.

Also read – Effective Communication: The Key to Successful Innovation

Accelerate Your Innovation Projects with Actionable Data from StartUs Insights

As AI continues to progress, data is playing a larger role in the innovation process. The good news is that you can use data to gather insights and make informed decisions. Wondering how?

At StartUs Insights, we develop Discovery Platform, a powerful startup database that covers more than 3 million startups & scaleups globally. Among other things, it enables Innovation Scouting. This helps companies like yours to keep a tab on the market — what’s new, what’s changing, what has the maximum scope, and much more. Some of our 1000+ corporate partners include Samsung, Nestlé, Lufthansa Cargo, KNAPP AG, Magna, CAF, Siemens Gamesa, Iberdrola, CARGOTECH, Bayer’s G4A, and Altair.

So, what does this mean for you?

• Reduce/Eliminate Manual Labour — Replace weeks of desk research with just one click. You get all the information you need on startups, scaleups, technologies, and trends, all from one single source.
• Access to 100x Faster & Exhaustive Scouting — Get the best results out of over 1.8 billion data points from the WWW, startup ecosystem, databases, company aggregators, publications, research, and patents!
• Deep Innovation Graph — Our proprietary and unique data in combination with our fast and exhaustive search process allows you to discover hidden diamonds long before anyone else does.
• Leverage Large-scale Search Capabilities — Our highly performant search process allows you to manage even the largest queries. 1000 keywords? No problem!

Why is our Platform Better than Others?

• When you already know companies that matter to you, you can easily find more like them by using the Similar Company Search.
• Find, mark, and manage relevant solutions all in one tool using the Scout Manager.
• Once you identify relevant solutions, simply export the list and integrate it into your CRM.

That is not all. Our Discovery Platform also offers Trend Intelligence that gives you access to 29 500+ trends and technologies. This allows you to:

• Anticipate Future Trends & Business Opportunities — we deploy advanced analytics to hundreds of thousands of trusted sources on startups, emerging technologies, and industry trends to provide you with accurate insights into trends impacting your industry in a short amount of time.
• Stay Up to Date — Monitoring the business ecosystem continuously ensures the identification of emerging technologies, trends, and opportunities. Our service provides you with regular updates on recent developments through Trend Intelligence Reports, Innovation Maps, and Real-time Databases.

Harnessing the power of data and using it strategically helps you take your innovation projects to the next level. With data, you generate new ideas, test hypotheses, and create value for your customers.