I read this article the other morning in a morning briefing I get from Axios each day (a great digital news company, that I highly recommend.) Anyways, the topic related back to some of our early class discussions about innovation and how old, established companies innovate to keep up with tech startups. Interestingly, this article suggests that old bell-weather companies actually fear innovation and competition the most from their established rivals, for one reason…these companies own the most data. There is a video attached to the article that I have not gotten the chance to watch yet, but apparently IBM did a presentation on a study they recently commissioned which found that, “based on interviews with 12,854 C-suite executives in 112 countries across 20 industries, 72% said that, if their sector is disrupted, it will be by old hands such as themselves.”
nice. will be interesting to see how all of this plays into the Internet of Things. The data alone could be sold for more than a lot of these companies’ products.
I’ve always found this topic very interesting. Once you begin to realize the value of consumer data it forces you to start to look at business moves in a completely different way. A move like amazon creating it’s autonomous grocery stores (https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/5/13842592/amazon-go-new-cashier-less-convenience-store) on its face looks very much like Amazon wanting to get into the grocery industry, but at the end of the day that’s not the whole story. By being able to set up an autonomous shopping system Amazon will gain the holy grail of customer data. Since everything will be tracked by computers and linked to individuals’ personal amazon accounts, the company will know things like: when a specific individual buys different types of items; what items they pick up then put back; what areas of the store they frequent most; what is the eye level of the products they buy the most; and, much more. Overall, this article does a good job of introducing the future of business, it’s no longer just make a product and sell it to consumers; the future of business also includes the gathering and selling of consumer data that is often times even more valuable than the products themselves.