Innovation thrives when people have ideas.  Ideas are really just a question that begs to be answered, and in customer science that’s a hypothesis to be tested.

If ideas are just questions that need an answer, then it stands to reason that the faster you answer the questions, the more opportunity there is for innovation. Not all ideas lead to value… but some do.  The more questions you can pose, the higher the chance of finding ones that create valuable initiatives.  However, the opposite is also true, if people can’t get answers quickly, they eventually stop asking for them. 

I recently stumbled across an old presentation from 2014 that I delivered to the Marketing Association. The brief was “once you have a Data strategy how do you execute and turn that into action?”. At the time I was transitioning out of Air NZ where I had formed and led the Customer Analytics team for five years – so I had much to say on the topic. Let’s see how my recommendations stack up in today’s environment…

“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Data based innovation is delivered by agile teams, not a lone wolf Data Scientist.