A hospital can drive innovation by using data from patients to reduce their average stay. School students can improve their learning levels by data from an online resource that encourages a fun learning experience.

Collect data without breaking the bank

You can use ‘little data’ techniques to gain insights into your customers and your business. For example, an ice cream vendor could look at the weather forecast and increase their staff levels on that day to target customers beaches and parks.

Here’s some ways you can use ‘little data’ in your business:

• Use the internet to research spending patterns and trends in your marketplace.
• Use cloud-based computing tools to access resources that analyse your data.
• Consider running a promotion that allows you to survey your customers and ways to improve your business.
• Develop a market research checklist to find out about economic and industry trends, customer needs, newly-released products and what your competitors are doing.

Find out more

• Read about how to find the competitive edge that your businesses must harness in our updated section on research and innovation.