What Will Happen if you Mix Big Data With Creativity

Luc de Brabandere is the founder of Cartoonbase and a fellow in the Paris office of The Boston Consulting Group.

He leads strategic seminars with boards, senior executives and managers from a wide range of companies looking to develop new visions, new products and services and long-term scenarios to prepare the future.

Why Big Data will never invent something

Yes, “Big Data” will be very useful to companies – as it will help them gather all information that was hidden.

But it will be the creativity of those who put it in place that will make the difference between “better of something that already exists” or “something else”.

The use of a computer has changed the way we write, read, memorize, communicate, calculate, etc. It also changes dramatically the way we produce new ideas.

Since a machine can’t forget, can’t get out of his own program, breakthrough ideas are impossible without “human creativity”.

It cannot forget its own memory or it is programmed to do it. It cannot create its own program. Forgetting is magical and essential to the human imagination.

Big data, then, can help to discover, that is to say to find what is hidden. But let’s be clear:

“Big data can never invent, that is, find what is nowhere.”

Therefore, adding human creativity to the existing “Big data,” that a machine can get for you (find the hidden aspects) is necessary if you want to invent.

It is used as a tool to discover, but not a tool to invent. For example, when you eat in several restaurants, the concept of restaurant emerges but it is not related to details.

We forget details easily, but a machine does not forget details. Again, gaining all details (big data) and adding creativity (human creativity=a new box) will help you to innovate and have new ideas.

Luc referred in his speech to some examples in history. Inventions of Archimedes or Einstein. It is true, they discovered things many others would not be able to. They used an accumulation of data of all kinds, “Big Data”.

Also, take a look at Kepler “Big Data” helped Kepler to discover, as he looked at the sky during hundreds of nights and discovered that planets follow ellipses and not circles while moving around the sun.

So, OK, Big data could have suggested Kepler’s epllipsis, but it could not have given the idea of natural selection to Darwin?

Or the idea of the BMI index to Quetelet? They both discovered through data and information but equally through having good ideas and adding creativity.

Two drivers of change : innovation and creativity.

If your organisation uses big data alone, it will have a bigger chance to fail, since it will be reduced to only seeing everything as a nail to hit with your new data-shaped hammer.

Creativity is one of the most important traits of this generation, companies that do not encourage creativity cannot innovate, and if a company does not innovate, it will be obsolete.

However, today a company needs to be creative much faster and that makes it very challenging and difficult.

When it comes to creativity and innovation, a company is not a complete model. For example, IBM, 30 years ago.

The CEO of IBM realized that IBM was unable to create a PC. The company had fallen behind in the PC market.

The CEO was smart enough to realize his ideas were not enough to catch up. So he created a pseudo start-up.

He removed 100 people from the hierarchy, put them in a smaller collaborative environment in Florida and told them to forget IBM for 12 month and said: “Do whatever you want but in 1 year I want my PC”.

They delivered the PC and re-entered the system. It was a success. This method, which proved successful, is just one example of step-change models used to drive creativity and innovation for the benefit of companies, market needs and business sectors.

We can use Big Data to help us analyse the enormous amount of information we have today in order to discover new things.

It enables organizations to analyse their data in a way that was not possible before. But, today, we need to use both “Big Data” & “Creativity” in order to be innovative.

“If big data can help us discover, it rests upon us to invent”