Top 10 big data and social science innovations

People look to academia as the source of innovation, and especially so in the natural and physical sciences. Researchers in biosciences, clinical medicine, physics, and chemistry have always generated new ideas for industry to capitalize on. Generally, innovations coming out of the social sciences would be assimilated into the private sector via secondments or collaborative projects, with Richard Thaler’s Behavioral Insights Team as the finest example. However, the emergence of big data and computational social science has generated a host of technologies that are either developed together with social science researchers or have clear application in the social science praxis outside academia.