innovation

Disruption has gone mainstream. Ever since the media picked up on the disruption thread and the technology revolution where startups have disrupted established slow-moving corporations, there has been a flurry of activity at these staid organizations to get onto the innovation bandwagon. Advisory firm Gartner, who gave us “hype cycles” and who thrive on publishing “magic quadrants” has coined the term “bimodal” to sanctify an exploratory, experimental approach to IT. Organizations are rushing to instill “intrapreneurship”, accelerators, corporate venture capital funds, and innovation labs to preempt being disrupted.

With the ongoing Big data revolution, and the impending Internet of Things revolution, there has been a renewed enthusiasm in “innovation” around data. Similar to the Labs concept started by Google (think Gmail Beta based on Ajax, circa 2004), more and more organizations, business communities, governments and countries are setting up Labs to foster innovation in data and analytics technologies. The idea behind these “data innovation labs” is to develop avant-garde data and analytics technologies and products in an agile fashion and move quickly from concept to production.