California Management Review
California Management Review is a premier academic management journal published at UC Berkeley
by Karl Werder, Stefan Seidel, Jan Recker, Nicholas Berent, John Gibbs, Nouredine Abboud, and Yossef Benzeghadi
To stay ahead of the competition, firms must continuously learn from their customers and swiftly adopt those lessons to improve their products. A unit at Ubisoft, a leading game publisher headquartered in Paris, has established a three-pronged approach to drive product innovation based on three practices: data-driven exploration, data-augmented ideation, and data-informed validation. By establishing processes and capabilities for these practices and blending them in a portfolio approach to product design, they maximize the value generation potential of the data at their disposal. Product development in a variety of industries can benefit from the lessons of these data-oriented innovation practices.