From Paradigm shift to paradigm analytics

Michelangelo once said – “the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark”

Packaging an incremental concept, idea, product feature or service to consumers in a “supposedly new avatar” has long been the mantra for most marketing folks as they are continually challenged to come up with new things that will keep them at the forefront so as to not lose market share and more implicitly mindshare.

Paradigm shift has been overused and abused by marketers to the extent that many of the mature ones refrain from using it as it creates the false pretense of something truly new and remarkable for audiences and consumers.

But with advanced analytics, I believe we are again at the cusp of a paradigm shift, as this is the last bastion left to conquer wherein data insights can really unearth facets within the unknown “unknown”. Many major scientific and other discoveries happened because of the quest for a cure or a solution to a problem but more importantly created new frontiers directly or indirectly – like RedBox DVD and Pfizer’s Viagra. Were those accidents waiting to happen – at some level I believe, because the quest was to see what worked, after many an experiment , we unearthed these discoveries. The new paradigm is not going to be a shift but the creation of multiple paradigms – a case in point being recently for one of our customers; by developing a mathematical model to predict payment default, we were able to convert data insights into a new complementary service offering that will fetch them an additional $2 Mn revenue stream – this is a case where the paradigm is not shifting, but actually creating one.

Advanced analytics is not just the way enterprises will sustain their competitive advantage, but also be the lever that will create new services in related and un-related business areas and correlate adjacencies easily that were hither –to not possible and thereby question the very existence of prevalent paradigms. Are we at the dawn of paradigm analytics?