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More than half of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. As digital connection and creation – the Internet of Things – becomes ever more prevalent, we have to consider how data can better be interpreted, personalized, and improved. In this podcast, we explore IoT, and how it can impact your business.

When I was listening to IdeaScale’s latest podcast – an interview with the founder of Orange’s IoT Studios, Mike Vladimer – I was shocked to hear this statistic: that more than 90% of the world’s total data was created in the last two years that means that everything that’s come before us: from cave drawings to Ross Perot’s ears to the Force Awakens… pales in comparison to the amount of data that is being produced today.

There are tons of reasons for this: after all, many of us can all search and publish data with a few finger taps, we’ve all become creators in some form or another with social media and digital photography, but a key contributor is… (you guessed it)… the internet of things with more than 200 billion devices projected to be connected to the internet in 2020. Each of those devices is tracking and sharing data with one another, but the true power of the internet of things, according to Mike Vladimer, is the new functionality that the data can empower.

For example, The Weather Channel receives 18,055,556 forecast requests every minute! But as Vladimer would point out, the people requesting that information aren’t actually interested in the weather. They’re wondering if they should bring a jacket, if an umbrella’s going to be necessary, if they should go for picnic or cancel an event. The gift of the internet of things and its consequent wealth of data is that soon designers and engineers are going to be able to integrate all of that information and answer the question that the user has without having to offer extraneous data like the current temperature. It’ll just say “be sure to wear socks today, Rob, I know your feet tend to run cold.”

But that has me thinking about all the data that we’re currently looking at in an innovation management system and the job that we’re asking that data to do. Take voting, for example – voting on ideas is generally used to indicate idea popularity or desirability in a marketplace. So what if instead of showing the votes on an idea – you simply were served the message – “this idea has strong marketplace desirability.”

This sort of personalization and engineering is still a little ways (but not too far) away. It’s necessary to coordinate and customize all the data in these various systems to be able to answer specific questions, but the point that stuck with me after I had listened to the podcast is that companies need to start thinking about how the internet of things is going to participate in their business. None of us are doing that enough. What data needs inform your current offering or what data are you producing that could inform other products? What systems can you now speak to that you couldn’t before? And most importantly: those humans at the center of the equation… what are they really looking to do? It allows you to get to another layer of human need and really transform how you put the customer or citizen at the center of your organizational transformation.

Want to learn more about how the internet of things might impact your business? You can listen to the full episode with Orange’s Mike Vladimer here.

About the author

Rob Hoehn is the co-founder and CEO of IdeaScale: the largest open innovation software platform in the world. Hoehn launched crowdsourcing software as part of the open government initiative and IdeaScale’s robust portfolio now includes many other industry notables, such as EA Sports, NBC, NASA, Xerox and many others. Prior to IdeaScale, Hoehn was Vice President of Client Services at Survey Analytics.

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