Wiley & sas business Series

part. Given enough information, there ’s no end of interesting ideas a 
reasonably motivated person can come up with—ideas that, if fostered 
for long enough, sometimes germinate into potential innovations. 
Insight is the road that never ends; if you ’re not careful, the journey 
sometimes becomes more important than the destination. 
 There ’s always one more fact to fi nd, one more way of slicing 
the data, one more information source, one more report, one more 
mashup. It ’s addictive. Discovery can be a dangerous siren; more than 
one explorer has become wrecked upon her shores. 
Big Data, Big Innovation: Enabling Competitive Differentiation 
through Business Analytics by Evan Stubbs
Copyright © 2014 by SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

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B I G   D A T A ,   B I G   I N N O V A T I O N
 The smartest group in the world is just another cost if they don ’t 
add value. And, while insight or effi ciency is still a form of value, it ’s 
not the best type of value. The best teams excel in producing both 
internal  and  external value, as shown in Figure    6.1  . 
  The true goal is  external value . These are the outcomes that every-
one  outside  the analytics group is happy to recognize. Usually tangible, 
they ’re normally closely linked to growth, improvement, or effi cacy in 
some form. Common measures include revenue, profi tability, or cost 
reductions. They ’re normally created through using analytics or big 
data to identify and deliver quality improvements in some form. It ’s 
created through sourcing information, generating insight, and acting 
on that insight to realize value. 
 On the way, those same teams need to create  internal value . These 
are outcomes that people  
inside  the analytics group see as valuable. 
Importantly, not everyone outside the group will always recognize these 
outcomes as being important. Sometimes intangible, they ’re normally 
closely linked to new capabilities, productivity, or effi ciency. It ’s created 
through improving automation, managing intellectual property as assets, 
and ensuring governance processes are aligned against requirements. 
 While internal value  does  normally reduce structural cost in some 
form, the linkage between the outcome and the cost reduction is often 
unclear. For example, the use of prebuilt modeling processes might help 
teams do more work. Unfortunately, while productivity might help the