Innovative Ideas Are Hiding in Internal Data

Thursday, December 9, 2010 - Kaihan Krippendorff, Fast Company

When Okio Morita, Sony's founder, strolled through his labs and saw engineers working with small speakers attached their heads to listen to music privately, he made a connection. In another lab he remembered seeing a different group of engineers working on a portable tape player. He observed and oriented-- put two pieces of information together--and came up with a new idea: a portable, personal music player. The Walkman revolutionized the electronics industry and created the concept of mobile music.

Great ideas often come from connecting things that have not been connected before. But as companies grow bigger and divide themselves into businesses and divisions, maintaining the cross-filtering of idea-sparking information becomes unwieldy.

Attivio and its Unified Information Access (UIA) seek to bring this cross-pollination and coordination to an entire company electronically. It essentially takes the structured dashboards and reports of business intelligence (BI) and mashes it together with Google-esque unstructured results of search, to give you all the information that is relevant to you in one place, regardless of where the information comes from.

Click here to read the full article on FastCompany.com!