Monsanto earns Forbes CIO Innovation Award for science@scale analytics platform

Monsanto has been named a 2017 Forbes CIO Innovation award winner for its data science platform, science@scale.  The company’s IT and R&D divisions partnered to develop and launch the analytics platform which is helping to solve complex agricultural challenges for Monsanto’s next-generation plant genomics research.


Forbes magazine recognizes IT organizations and CIOs that have made some of the biggest impacts on revenue growth through innovation. Jim Swanson, Chief Information Officer for Monsanto, accepted the award on behalf of Monsanto at the Forbes CIO Next 2017 Summit in New York City on Oct. 16.

“[We] wanted to provide our data scientists the ability to collaborate and share analytics models on a global scale and enable our scientists to take full advantage of our ever-expanding information assets,” says Swanson. “With this recognition, I couldn’t be more proud of all the teams that made science@scale possible. A well-deserved success!”

Since its release, Swanson says, the platform has proven to accelerate the development of analytics-driven decision models by turning data into actionable insights across Monsanto’s R&D pipeline, Commercial and Global Supply Chain by paving the way to transforming data science from exploration to full production implementation.

“Thanks to science@scale, in less than a year, we have gone from a few fields with models being run by statisticians on desktop computers and results delivered as flat files, to delivering automated zone placement across the entire North American breeding network and beyond,” said Bobby Brauer, Monsanto’s breeding field systems lead. “Today, these models are generating zones that ensure more uniform, predictable results from our most important field trials.”