Put Your Data to Work in the Marketplace

Almost all companies grossly underutilize their data assets. Even firms that mine their data for strategic insights barely scratch the surface. Yet, the marketplace value of data is huge and growing. Consider the capital-intensive container-shipping industry. By some estimates, half the value of the delivery of a container resides in the associated data. Origin data, for example, help speed containers through customs and security, and timetables for unloading ships facilitate just-in-time truck and rail scheduling. In my work with and research on hundreds of companies across multiple industries, I’ve identified nine distinct strategies that organizations can employ to put their data to work in their marketplaces. As you use the table below to identify opportunities for creating new value from your data, ask the following questions: What data do we own or have access to that could be better leveraged using each strategy? Which of these data are of sufficient quality to withstand market scrutiny? Which of these data will others pay for? Which of the nine strategies is the best way to bring these data to market? Nine Strategies to Bring Data to Market Each numbered strategy below is accompanied by an example (in italics) of how it might be—or already is being—executed. 1. Provide new content: Sell or license new, richer, or more-targeted data. A personalized diet: A meal-by-meal program that would tailor menus to each customer’s sex, age, health status, exercise routine, travel schedule, and wellness goals 2. Repackage: Filter, synthesize, and reformat data created by others. Online custom reports: Customized, just-in-time data distilled from multiple sources and sent directly to a customer’s PDA 3. Informationalize: Outfit existing offerings to enable them to create and deliver useful data. An instrument-equipped hospital gown: Heart-rate and other monitoring devices integrated into a gown that could transmit real-time patient data to hospital staff 4. Unbundle: Extract data from existing products and sell those data separately. Unbundled equity trading: Separating investment advice from trade execution in order to allow advisers to focus on and charge separately for the advice 5. Exploit asymmetries: Use superior access to or understanding of data to leverage perceived differences in the value of products or services. Hedge fund management: The use of data-derived insights by hedge fund managers to create opportunities for arbitrage 6. Rectify asymmetries: Provide data to the less-informed party in a transaction in order to level the playing field. Consumer education: Unbiased product performance, quality, and price comparisons, like those Consumer Reports offers, to enable consumers to make better-informed buying decisions 7. Provide identifiers: Create unique labels for households, retail outlets, and products to help businesses find what and whom they are looking for. An expanded securities-numbering system: An international system, modeled after Standard & Poor’s CUSIP system for U.S. securities, to make all securities worldwide easily distinguishable 8. Infomediate: Make it easier for consumers to find the data they need. Webpage ranking: A proprietary ranking method, like that used by Google, that delivers highly relevant search results 9. Mine data and conduct analytics: Sift data to gain an understanding of customer behavior, spot product trends, and more. Movie rental behavior: Recommending films to customers based on their and others’ previous rental choices, as Netflix does Using the screening tool in this way helps companies discover quantities of data that are uniquely their own and explore new ways to exploit them.

Put Your Data to Work in the Marketplace

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