Escaping the Data Trap: How Opinions Unlock True Innovation

“We have to be data driven”, says everyone. And yes. I agree 90% of the time, however it shouldn’t be taken as a blanket statement. Like every part else in life, recognizing where it does and doesn’t apply is significant.

In a world obsessive about data, it’s the daring, opinionated decisions that break through to revolutionary innovation.

The Economist wrote in regards to the rumoured, critical blunders of McKinsey within the Nineteen Eighties through the early days of the smartphone era. AT&T asked McKinsey to project the scale of the smartphone market.

McKinsey, presumably after rigorous projections, expert calls, and data crunching, shared that the estimated total market could be about 900,000 smartphones. They based it on data, specifically data in that point. It was bulky, large, and only a vital evil for mobile people. Data lags.

AT&T pulled out initially, partly, resulting from those recommendations, before diving back available in the market to compete. Some weren’t as lucky. Every strategy consultant in South Korea will know in regards to the rumours of McKinsey sharing an identical advice to one among the biggest conglomerates that used go go head-to-head with Samsung: LG. They pulled out of the market, and lost even taking a shot at becoming a world leader on this estimated 500 billion dollar market.

Today, the World Economic Forum shared in a recent evaluation that there are more smartphones than people on earth, with roughly 8.6 BILLION subscribed phones.

The designer and builder of the iPhone and Nest Tony Faddell, shares in his book Construct that decisions are driven by some proportion of opinions and data. And for the very first version of a product which can be revolutionary, versus evolutionary, are by definition opinion driven. They usually’re useful for several types of innovation:

• Revolutionary: Complete re-thinking of a certain feature or process, often 10x higher than the prevailing options
• Evolutionary…