Jack Cox

• How is your presentation relevant to the theme of this year’s BBC conference: Innovation in the Fast Lane?

The presentation is relevant to ‘Innovation in the Fast Lane’. As companies race to exploit machine learning for competitive advantage, operational efficiency, or customer service a modern analyst needs to understand the basics of machine learning and how to incorporate them into the business.

• What are your top tips for companies or employees wishing to innovate?

1. Look for the value in the innovation. Innovating for the sake of innovating won’t help things. There needs to be some value. Find it, and figure out how to communicate to the rest of the organization
2. Innovation is risky, some attempts will fail. If you’re not occasionally failing you’re not reaching far enough
   • Figure out how to fail fast
   • Communicate and get buy-in that failure is okay because you’ll fail fast
3. Spread the innovation love. Innovation shouldn’t be isolated to special labs or corners of the company. Sometimes the most valuable innovations come from the trenches where people are actually executing the processes in need of innovation.