The volume and speed of data available over the internet present great opportunity for deriving new business insight, but a lot of that data is unstructured. Making sense of it requires applying business intelligence techniques such as data visualization, data warehousing, and data text-mining, which not all businesses do well.

The Center for Technology Innovation provides partner companies with guidance in this area. Part of the UWM Lubar School of Business, it hosts collaborative research projects and workshops on topics like big data analytics and social media marketing.

Partner companies include Northwestern Mutual, Rockwell Automation, MGIC and Harley-Davidson. Center faculty and students create interactive tools that help executives mine data in order to see trends. Students recently built a mobile app prototype that helps MGIC employees track and analyze sales.