I have always been curious about how people generate ideas for radical innovation. It’s why I have a wide variety of books on the topic on my shelf, from Melissa Schilling’s Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World to Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. I’m intrigued by the role of data in the innovation process— leading to another set of books in my collection, including Peter Verhoef and co-authors’ Creating Value with Big Data Analytics and Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz’s Winning with Data. In fact, I teach a course on this very topic in our business analytics master’s program at the University of Montana.
Certainly, marketing has excelled in developing sophisticated techniques to measure customer reaction to new concepts, whether new products or advertising messages. And now we have access to Big Data, characterized by the plethora of types (e.g., sentiment analysis, click streams, credit card usage) and sheer volume, real-time generation and analysis.
McKinsey’s Brian Gregg, Jason Heller, Jesko Perrey and Jenny Tsai wrote about the relationship between data analytics and innovation in a 2018 post on the company’s website. The authors called it a myth that “‘ideas and numbers’ have always had an uneasy alliance in marketing. … Creativity is an instinctual process of building emotional bonds with consumers. Bring in too much quantitative analysis and the magic dies.” Even Marketoonist Tom Fishburne has captured the stereotype. In one cartoon, professionals—presumably marketers—quip to a painter, “Now let’s optimize the creative by adding puppies, emojis and an incentivized call-to-action.”
To read full article, click here: https://www.ama.org/marketing-news/is-there-magic-in-the-mashup-of-data-and-creativity/