Spannende Frage heute: Sind Unternehmen, die im Besitz der meisten Daten sind, auch die innovativsten?
The trouble is that the source of innovation is shifting – from human ingenuity to data-driven machine-learning. Google’s self-driving cars are getting better through the analysis of billions of data points collected as Google’s self-driving cars roam the street. IBM Watson detects skin cancer as precisely as the average dermatologist because it has been training itself with hundreds of thousands of skin images. Siri and Alexa are getting better at understanding what we say because they never stop learning. Of course, it takes plenty of talented, creative people to build these products. But their improvement is driven less by a human “aha-moment” than by data and improvements in how machines learn from it.
Sometimes companies have to go out and collect a specific kind of data – think of Google’s cars roaming the streets of Silicon Valley. And sometimes companies pay for access to data so that their systems can learn. But more often than not, the data that fuels innovation is being generated by users interacting with an existing digital service. When we accept Siri’s suggestion, it’s feedback to Siri that she got it right. And when we surf away from Amazon’s product recommendation, it’s another feedback signal that we weren’t so happy. It’s the same when a driver in a Tesla takes over from assisted driving, or when we accept (or don’t accept) Google auto-completing our search query. This feedback data is incredibly valuable because it is the raw material feed into machine learning tools; it’s the very resource that fuels data-driven innovation. And the more you have, the better you get. Take self-driving cars as an example. During 2016, self-driving cars by major international car manufacturers improved by roughly a third. That’s a significant jump. But Google collected far more data per car to feed a more advanced machine learning system, and its cars improved by 400%– an amazing jump in innovation, and more than ten times as much as cars utilizing less data.
But if innovation is founded on data rather than human ideas, the firms that benefit are the ones that have access to the most data. Therefore, in many instances, innovation will no longer be a countervailing force to market concentration and scale. Instead, innovation will be a force that furthers them.
