I recently got the new issue from Scientific American (October 2013), and in the front page was announced the article ‘The Data-Driven Society’ by Alex Pentland. I just had to read it 🙂
He co-leads the World Economic Forum on Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. He was talking about all the digital bread crumbs we leave behind on our daily life (like gps and gsm info, or electronic payments) and what can be done with it.
With his students of the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory, he is discovering mathematical patterns through data analytics that can predict human behaviour. ‘Bread crumbs record our behaviors as it really happens’ he says, it is more accurate than the information from social media, where we choose what we want to disclose from ourselves. Alex and his team are in particular interested in the patterns of idea flows.
Among the most surprising findings that my students and I have discovered is that patterns of idea flow (measured by purchasing behavior, physical mobility or communications) are directly related to productivity growth and creative output.
Analysing those flows, he uncovered 2 factors that have a positive pattern of healthy idea flow:
- engagement: connecting to others, usually in the same team or organisation, and
- exploration: going abroad to exchange ideas.
Both are needed for creativity and innovation to flourish. To find those factors, he based his research on graphs of different types of interactions, like person-to-person, emails, sms..
We may not have the tools he used (like an electronic badges for tracking person-to-person interactions) but intuitively this is something we know, a good communication is essential for the success of a team, but talking to an external person may provide a new insight. It’s always good to be proved right, isn’t it?
Check my next post, I’ll continue with his article, there are a lot of great concepts he is presenting as the ‘new deal on data’ for personal data protection.
