Today’s most innovative pharmaceutical products have some way or another been affected by the big data movement. Data is currently a currency that some of the largest companies commoditize.

One of the best examples is Facebook, a company that uses social media data to target smarter ads based on the demographic and preferential data the platform gathers from people’s online behaviors.

Pharmaceutical companies are starting to dive into data as well, especially when analyzing strategies to get more product out and reaching the right audiences without the expensive marketing research budgets. Big data implications are helping companies, both large and small, make smarter decisions based on the numbers. And as promising as big data is, we’re barely scratching the surface. Companies only analyze 12% of data on average. As we interpret more of the available data, we learn how to run industries and individual businesses better.