dunnhumby Taps Crowdsourcing for NPDI

5/7/2013
dunnhumby, a customer science company, will host a Big Data hackathon challenge May 11 in Boston, MA, in an effort to develop a predictive model for the success of new product launches at retail. For the challenge, participants will have access to a dataset developed from the company’s customer database of shopping behavior for 400 million households worldwide.

Participants will be able to create predictive models based on 13 weeks of anonymous, customer-level purchase behavior and sales data for 3,000 new product launches, to predict how successful those products will be in market at 26 weeks. The participant with the most accurate model wins. 

“With Big Data, we have an opportunity to revisit traditional inefficiencies associated with new product launches and crowdsource an innovative solution for the industry,” says Yael Cosset, Global CIO of dunnhumby. “The challenge isn’t new but we believe that dunnhumby’s customer science expertise and unique data assets could make all the difference. Data is quickly changing the world around us and we see our data asset as a powerful resource for innovation within retail.”

New product development (NPD) is a key competitive strategy for consumer goods manufacturers but remains a challenge with upwards of 80 percent of those products failing in market. With billions of dollars invested annually and nearly 20,000 new consumer goods products launched each monthly globally, according to Mintel, predicting a product’s success could have significant implications for the industry. “Crowdsourcing plays an influential role in how we innovate at dunnhumby and, ultimately, how we deliver value to our clients,” says Dave Balter, a member of dunnhumby’s global executive team and CEO of BzzAgent, a Boston-based dunnhumby company. “NPD is a significant investment for brands and for retailers and we are seeking to deliver a new solution that allows those companies to understand more quickly if they should continue that investment or reallocate. Boston has a large community of technology and data-based start-ups and we’re hoping to tap into that entrepreneurial, white-space thinking with a fun competition.”

dunnhumby is partnering with hack/reduce, a Boston-based a non-profit supported by Boston’s venture capital and technology leaders, the State of Massachusetts and universities such as MIT and Harvard and the State of Massachusetts. For more information, or to participate, visit: http://dunnhumbyhackers.eventbrite.com/.

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