Big Data is, but not unquestioningly, the answer, he says

“Big Data,”  a phrase that’s often said aloud with lots of vim (“Big Data!”), is just a heap of junk — until you know what you’re looking for. Jake Porway, writing in the Harvard Business Review, points this out more clearly than many others have:

“We have a lot of data, but we have no idea what we should do with it.” The director of the foundation looked plaintively across the table at me. “We were thinking of having a hackathon, or maybe running an app competition,” he smiled. His co-workers nodded eagerly. I shuddered.

I have this conversation about once a week….

So begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.