Business innovation is not enough; new product innovation is not enough, ... Companies are wondering what to do. Our advice is to focus on the customer. Get more from the customer.

I believe this company is able to get back a couple of billion dollars in revenue, and business intelligence was our ticket to do that, ... That is an absolutely sleeping giant in our portfolio. That's a $15 billion to 18 billion market where there's no one clear market leader. I had very high expectations for the role of business analytics.

When you think there is nothing left to improve on, your business dies, for there is no shortage of innovators

Data Scientists should recall innovation often times is not providing fancy algorithms, but rather value to the customer.

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

The Bay Area is the birthplace of much of the business sector's innovation. We need to apply that same innovation to helping find creative solutions to the tough problems of health care cost, quality and access. The Bay Area Economic Forum is in a unique position to help catalyze creative thinking that brings business, government and the social sector together to come up with those ideas, instead of just passing the buck.