2020 Data Trends: Data Becomes The New Language For Innovation 

Have you heard about the Riddell Speedflex Precision Diamond Helmets that feature a 3D-printed liner customized for each athlete? This innovative production approach is aimed at making football safer by giving players extra protection to prevent concussions. Riddell is leveraging data to make these enhancements possible.

Data to define the future

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Riddell tapped the wealth in data to create a safer future for players. In a true sense, innovations are our way of creating the future.

Thanks to the ever-growing data leading the way, the most unusual creations of our times have emerged. Data-driven innovations now form a key growth pillar for most organizations that create significant competitive advantages.

Data-driven outcomes to foster new industries, processes, and products

Collect data. Zero down on the precise data set you need, and render it into products and solutions that perform better. Data sets are becoming a core asset in the economy. Continually emerging data-driven insights showcase how far we’ve come and challenge us to create new things.

Data will continue to add value to multiple aspects of human life and business parameters. With cognitive systems becoming more and more efficient, workers and organizations will be impacted by the power of more information, and text, speech, and images will provide more data sources for broadening analytics projects. Image recognition, text recognition, and face recognition will continue to be significant inputs for analytics applications.

Data-driven innovation hubs and startups

Businesses will create data-driven innovation hubs housing expertise and facilities to help industrial sectors become more innovative through data. The research will create spin-outs, attracting startups and established businesses and driving public- and private-sector investment.

Fintechs will be the winners in innovation hubs as they focus on niche innovations in fraud management, creating new products and simplifying processes. Utilities will witness a reboot.

Customer experience management

A data-driven company is only as good as the insights it gathers. Creativity will drive artificial intelligence and machine learning applications as we optimize the systems and platforms, and the confluence of data from various sources will enable the creation of more competent, reliable, and dependable products.

Collaboration will become more common as new niche entrants cooperate with tech giants that are sitting on a wealth of user data. 2020 will witness changes in platforms through data, and many new platforms will be born from insights within data sets.

Social innovations

2020 will be a time when citizens will benefit from the data revolution as it helps economic growth, creates social change, and optimizes public services. With enough data available, governments will increase the use of data-driven innovations for sustainability and disaster-management initiatives.

Frugality in data capture and retention

With IoT and 5G leading the way, data will grow in spread, scope, and scale in 2020, increasing the problem of too much data. To add to the problem, a lot of data has a limited lifespan. At some point, it loses relevance and becomes inexact or outdated. But often, it is held in the mistaken belief that someday it might become useful. The adage “garbage in/garbage out” will be more valid than ever.

Organizations will start evaluating data strategies and reexamine the vast stores of data they have no idea what to do with and no hope of learning anything useful from. Unless they put good data governance in place, the organizations already struggling to store and analyze their data will drown in it.

Organizations will come to terms with the fact that collecting and storing data costs money – data requires storage, electricity to power it, and, if the information is sensitive (e.g., customer records), attention must be paid to security and data compliance. So they will become frugal in their pursuit of data.

See what else is on analysts’ radar in “Deloitte Report: Tech Trends 2020.”