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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-B Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. I'm talking

today with London Business School Professor Kevin Boudreau and we're talking about big data and innovation. Kevin, thanks so much for

joining us. It's great to be here. Thanks, Sarah. First, before we get into this, if people aren't

familiar with the term big data, what's your quick elevator pitch for explaining what

big data is to the uninitiated? So big data is a trend that could be or an

opportunity that could be as big as the internet itself and it derives from in large part a lot of the internet and information technologies that have risen in the past couple decades.

In operations, in marketing, in medical science, in any field of industries today, we collect

much more data than we used to. We simply, we collect data on every transaction. We collect data. Even at the level I mentioned, I mentioned medical research, you know, the idea of collecting terabytes of data even on the human genome and trying to make sense of it.

And so the opportunity is no longer one of simply collecting these data, but to use these data

to make better sense of our world and by developing algorithms and being able to have a greater predictive ability of what will happen in the future based upon what we've seen in the past in business and in science and in any

field of human endeavor. That's interesting and what I've been hearing as I've

been following along a little bit is that a lot of companies see big data as a marketing boom.

They can finally track their customers' habits more closely.

But what else could big data be used for it?

Could it really drive innovation? But what else could big data be used for it?

Could it really drive innovation?

Could it drive creativity?

You know, I'd first say that beyond just marketing,

...