Five Questions About Innovation with John Hossack, Cardinal Path President

Cardinal Path’s President and co-founder John Hossack explains why innovation is at the core of everything that his company does in order to be successful in the recent issue of Advantage Magazine. In the article, Converting Data Into Dollars, John recounts the genesis of his company and some key innovations like the Online Analytics Maturity Model and online/offline attribution modeling that have helped to drive Cardinal Path’s high-growth business.  John also shares his views on how lower infrastructure costs are changing the very nature of innovation in digital analytics.

What does innovation mean to your company?

Innovation is at the heart of what we do at Cardinal Path and essential to our growth. Part of our purpose is to know, to share, and to create competitive advantage. You cannot be on the leading edge of this industry without innovation.

Is there a technology, trend, or idea that’s driving your company forward?

Client-side, more and more organizations are awakening to the fact that they must become data-driven organizations in order to be competitive. This realization really moves our company forward because that’s exactly what we’re doing for people—empowering them to make business decisions based on what their data says.

Where do you hope this innovation will lead you in the next five years?

The next five years will see us doing more and more data science and predictive-analytics work. Once organizations have that critical data layer working for them and they can trust the data coming in, we’ll start to focus squarely on the fun stuff—transforming data into revenue.

How has the notion of innovation changed in the past decade?

Ten years ago, the limiting factors were the costs of infrastructure. But with ability to access storage in the cloud, organizations can do a lot more and be more aggressive about trying new things. With data to guide us, we are free to get out in front of trends as they are happening. So being innovative doesn’t have to be as risky as it was once.

How do you cultivate innovation within your workforce?

Once a year, we have an innovation event where different offices will submit standout ideas based on the work we’re doing for clients, with an aim to replicate that success in other areas. We also have weekly Friday meetings across the company to talk about the latest and most exciting work that we’re doing. We are sharing analytics applications with our teams that didn’t exist just months earlier.

Read the full interview.

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