Veros Advisors DESIGNING THE FUTURE Delivered a Window on the Future and the Impact of Big Data on Business

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 8, 2013 – Yesterday, over 65 attendees from the worlds of science, healthcare, finance and consumer products gained invaluable insights on the impact of big data in business, from a leading futurist and a panel of innovative executives at DESIGNING THE FUTURE, presented by Veros Advisors.

 “What you hear today, will enable you to stretch beyond what is, to what could be, and peer a little bit into the future,” said Frank Pulcini, Founder and President of Veros Advisors, a design-driven strategy and innovation firm based in suburban Philadelphia that organized the event at the Union League of Philadelphia. 

In his keynote address, Patrick Tucker, Deputy Editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and Director of Communications for the World Future Society, noted that 90 percent of all data in the world today has been gathered since 2009, and how that data is being used is what results in our mixed feelings about big data. 

“Every time we turn on our cell phones, we generate data,” said Tucker.  “Everything we do now is information.  In 2010, there were more interconnected devices, approximately 12.5 billion, than there were people in the world, approximately 6.8 billion.  We are already outnumbered by machines.  Right now we feel we are at the mercy of machines.  We’ll never create less data, but what we need to do now is to understand the data we create, to understand each other, and to understand the role of these machines in our world.  

“How do you market your products to consumers who have so much more data available to them,” Tucker asked.  “We now create information, data, in everything we do.  We don’t feel empowered by that but we should be.  The data is yours, you create it – when we understand it, then the future opens up in really remarkable way.”

In the panel discussion that followed Tucker’s keynote presentation, Youngmoo Kim, Director of The exCITe Center at Drexel University, noted that “there is incredible value in big data, but with it comes big noise.  Being able to predicate where a person will be in 80 weeks, does that help the individual?  The cost benefit of that data on an individual basis is different than it is in the aggregate.  Machines can’t differentiate the signal from the noise, but individuals can.  We are still good at picking out the patterns.  With big data, comes big design challenges to present information that is important to the individual.”

According to Lawrence Husick, a serial entrepreneur and Managing Partner of Lipton, Weinberger & Husick, “Humans can extract information from data, impose an order on the data, and extract from the information, wisdom, which is something machines cannot do.  We’ve attempted to create artificial intelligence, but no one has attempted to create artificial wisdom.  Real wisdom is our ability to use this information for decisions that have value.”

Stephen Tang, Chief Executive Officer of the University City Science Center, commented that “the social implications of the mass of information is difficult for us to get our arms around.  All of us want to control our information, and to do that correctly, we need to address the human element in every interaction.”

That point was picked up on by Tom Doll, President of Subaru of America, who said that “We can use predictive data to work with our customers, but at the end of the day, it’s still a one-on-one transaction.  We need to learn how to listen to the customers, let them talk, and create value based on what we are hearing from them.”

Tucker concluded the discussion by noting that “design is predicting the future.  We need to design products and services based on the perceived needs of the customer, be open to a far greater amount of signals from them in the design process.  As technology becomes more widely distributed, we begin to react to the future like traders on Wall Street – we need to respond more quickly, and more responsively, to the information we get from big data and our relationships to one another.”

About Veros Advisors: Veros Advisors is a design-driven strategy and innovation firm that helps individuals and enterprises adopt a person-centric approach to innovation and growth.  The company collaborates with a wide variety of clients on innovation and strategy initiatives, including brand, communication, business design, insights and discovery, and product and service innovation.  Additional information is available at http://www.verosadvisors.com.