Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

Chapter 17

Analytics and Innovation

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

—Steve Jobs

In this chapter, we cover analytics and innovation, one of the seven pillars that make up the Business Analytics Success Pillars introduced in Chapter 2. To succeed in today’s fast-evolving competitive marketplace with consumers who are more informed and increasingly demanding, we have underscored that successful companies must harness advanced business analytics to meet their business challenges. To maintain their competitive edge, those companies need to analyze their data (big and small) coming from multiple sources and transform it into actionable intelligence. This intelligence not only provides a competitive edge but also makes critical issues visible to decision makers, enabling them to detect problems, better plan for the future, and identify opportunities to develop and improve products and services. Effective business analytics provides companies with the information necessary to differentiate their products and services from the competition. In other words, it enables them to innovate.

Companies must constantly improve their customers’ experience and their products and services through innovation. Analytics can help facilitate this innovation in countless ways, including helping the organization understand the dynamics of the market, determining what other companies are doing in the way of innovation, figuring out what customers want, and helping the organization ...