“In times like these we need innovation”
“We have innovation in our DNA”
Who among us has heard a version of those two lines or seen the above image used at some point in our career when discussing innovation ? (yep, thought so)
Innovation is the ultimate FAT word.
A FAT word is familiar, acceptable and typical. It has different meanings for different people. It’s also generic, so what do we really mean when we use the word innovation?
More importantly, what does it mean to our customers? To our business? What are the ‘innovation’ opportunities available to us? What does innovation look like?
To understand a little more about what innovation can mean to different groups of people, we used our proprietary AI solution, to explore in more detail.
The Process
First, we sourced publicly available data to create 3 different data sets which we uploaded to our system, these were:
1. A general data set
2. A data set focused on health data
3. A data set focused on businesses data
Next, we used NLP (Natural Language Processing) to explore the lateral contextual associations from the sourced data.
Once our system had read all the data we’d provided, we then set our algorithm to work by running a search for the word 'Innovation'.
It is here Machine learning is used to read and assess the data and provide us with a list of associated words so we can understand the similarities or differences of each data set.
The Outputs
The initial results from our search, with the two different ways we can explore and interpret the data, can be seen below:
Frequency versus Relatability
The first way to interpret the results is to filter them by frequency of association meaning we can see which words are more often associated the keyword term, in this instance, innovation.
If we were to do so here the different results are as follows:
You can see from the above, the general data set the most frequent words are associated with access to innovation as well as external performance.
The health data set shows us that it’s about longevity and relevancy and the business data show results more focused on internal performance and process.
Not content with using frequency alone, we can also explore and interpret the data using a relatability score to provide us with further information as to where to focus our innovation efforts:
In our exploration, the word associations whilst similar in implication, e.g. access, performance, longevity, relevancy, internal performance and process, show a slight nuance in the way that innovation can be expressed with different words ranking higher.
What does this mean?
Not only does this show that each data set views innovation differently, it means from a strategic creativity perspective the words available to us is broadened.
This is where it becomes exciting as we can begin a more in-depth exploration for these connections.
For example, to target our new ideas and innovation efforts towards a health focused consumer, we can explore words such as development, commitment & acceleration to build up a bigger picture around the meaning of innovation.
Alternatively, as a B2B provider we can target and explore the context of innovation through transformation, agility & culture.
We can also explore how this could change when we increase the parameters to include search the term 'innovative'.
But words are often not enough.
Another feature of our solution is the ability to build segmented image banks drawn from publicly available images or linked to a stock image library.
This means we can begin to create a narrative of what innovation might ‘look like’ when associated with different meanings, as the below snapshot suggests.
Innovation + Wealth 👇
Innovation + Accelerate👇
Innovation + Radical👇
The words and images can be combined and brought together as stimulus to from The Intelligent Brief™ with recommendations as to the direction of travel for a range of different strategic and creative outputs based on the business objectives (which I haven’t shown here).
As people and businesses, we often like to associate ourselves with the term innovation but as we have shown here, innovation is the ultimate FAT word and has different interpretations and means something different to different audiences.
The question is what does innovation mean to your customers and are you talking the same language?
If you can’t answer that question (or even if you think you can), why not put The Intelligent Brief™ to the test to see where it can get you.
Contact us for more information on The Intelligent Brief and to receive a copy of our eBook, AI Creativity and Innovation - Does it Live Up to the Hype?