Data science teams as innovation initiatives

When a big, established company is thinking about their data science strategy, chances are good that whatever they come up with, it’ll be somewhat at odds with the company’s current structure and processes. Which makes sense, right? If you’re a many-decades-old company trying to defend a successful and long-lived legacy and market share, you won’t have the advantage that many upstart competitors have of being able to bake data analytics and science into the core structure of the organization. Instead, you have to retrofit. If you’re the data scientist working in this environment, tasked with being on the front lines of a data transformation, you may be grappling with some real institutional challenges in this setup, and this episode is for you. We’ll unpack the reason data innovation is necessarily challenging, the different ways to innovate and some of their tradeoffs, and some of the hardest but most critical phases in the innovation process. Relevant links: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 https://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Innovation-Execution-Challenge/dp/1422166961