Understanding+the+opportunity+V+-+Understanding+through+analytics

Understanding The Opportunity V - Understanding through Analytics
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 <>

Topic overview:
Today's class will be divided into two distinct parts. In the first part of the class we will do practice sessions for a gate 2 review in which the teams try to convince a group of stakeholders that their observations merit further funding and resources to continue their product development project. Each group will have 10-15 minutes to present their findings for review and feedback from their classmates. This presentation will not be graded. This is low-risk opportunity for you to practice making such a presentation and to get feedback from the class on the ideas that you are presenting.

We will spend the second half of the class looking at a radically different approach to understanding your customers, their needs, wants, and desires -- data driven analytics. Throughout most of this class we are using what one might describe as the //IDEO approach// to uncovering and developing innovative product ideas. The IDEO approach involves careful observation of small numbers of people, experimentation, prototyping, and a lot of intuition and exploration in the physical world. In contrast, an analytics-driven approach to innovative product development relies on using sophisticated statistical analyses and machine-learning algorithms over very large data sets to uncover patterns and unexpected connections in actual customer behavior.

By the end of today's class, you should:
 * Have experienced presenting your proposal at a gate-2 review
 * Have significant feedback on the work you've done for challenge problem 4
 * Understand some of the ways that companies can combine rigorous statistical analysis and machine learning algorithms with large data sets to uncover useful and interesting information about their customers habits, practices, and patterns of behavior

Preparation for class:
In preparation for class today you need to read the following article:
 * How Companies Learn Your Secrets, by Charles Duhigg, New York Times, February 16, 2012
 * @http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

Reference materials:
Slides:

We will be using a set of slides from a 2004 talk by Ronny Kohavi and Matt Round of Amazon.com (as of 2004) to explore the ways that Amazon.com makes very aggressive use of data analytics to make product development and innovation decisions. These slides can be found at: @http://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/emetricsAmazon.pdf

The subset of slides that we are interested in from Kohavi and Round's talk are available here: