A B2B data-sharing economy: The next innovation wave

We share homes and cars using new digital platforms, why not share and monetise data?

The idea of putting unused physical assets to work and earning money from them by ‘renting' them out when they would otherwise sit idle is certainly a no-brainer these days. But before the likes of Uber and Airbnb, for example, it wasn't so obvious. These ‘sharing economy' business models have completely revolutionised how we think about physical assets.

This got me thinking: what other types of unused assets we could put to work?

The data-sharing economy

Every organisation today is awash with data from customer information to product specs, information about suppliers and partners, shipping and logistics records, and even the data that spans decades of business activity sitting on disks, servers, and laptops.

However, more often than not, this data is left sitting idle within organisations. With so much value locked up in this data, there is a real opportunity for us to start building a sharing economy for digital assets instead. With the right system in place, a business could easily share its data - especially unused and underused data - with partners, manufacturers, suppliers, and other third parties with a stake in its supply chains and business processes. This would, ultimately, allow them to gain rich insights that could help optimise everyone's performance and enable win-win improvements across the supply chain.

There are opportunities on offer in every imaginable business sector; healthcare, retail, financial services, manufacturing, and many more. Take, for example, the innovations that could be enabled by sharing data across the supply chain for consumer packaged goods. Businesses would have insight into how long a product sits on shelf before it's sold, for example, or even where damages are most likely to occur in the supply chain, and use these insights to improve the whole process from start to finish.

The ingredients for success

Much like any sharing economy business model, a data-sharing system needs two key components. First, it needs a platform for sharing large volumes of information, and second, it must be built on trust. Stakeholders sharing inside information across a platform need to be confident that their secrets, proprietary data, or competitive advantages aren't going to be compromised. They also need to trust that any data sharing practices are compliant with new data regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect in May next year.

Thankfully, such platforms do exist, but organisations face another challenge in the form of getting businesses to understand that data sharing can be a benefit rather than a threat. Enterprises today still tend to have a highly protectionist mindset about information. It is this attitude we have to overcome before we build a successful data-sharing economy.

Businesses need to see the good in sharing information. Better insights into customer and product trends could, for instance, help reduce the number of bugs in software, or help identify and resolve service problems before they lead to an uptick in customer support tickets. Imagine how such insights could help retailers ensure they have the right stock on hand, in the right quantity, and at the right time. The possibilities are endless.

Future gazing

Despite the huge opportunities on offer, it's important to note that we're not there yet. Fears of a business's most valuable information being leaked or competitive secrets falling into the wrong hands are still key concerns for many organisations.

However, over the next decade, I believe we'll start to see early movers adopting this data-sharing economy model. Once this handful of companies start to get it right, the rest of the business world will have no choice but to join in to remain competitive. Just as we saw with the rise of digital transformation, once the data-sharing economy gets going, it will be detrimental for a company not to follow, not to mention the network effect advantage that will come into play.

These days, organisations see data as a resource as vital as money or fuel. But it's now a case of unlocking the value that data holds and making it meaningful. Once they do this, with the help of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, the next step will be finding even more profitable ways to put this currently idle data to use, and sharing it with other companies in their network.

Just as we have made money from underused cars and homes, it's time for us to consider how we can monetise our underused information in the same way. The opportunity is right at our fingertips, and there for the taking. A B2B data-sharing economy will be the next wave of innovation and those businesses that ride it first will set themselves up for success ahead of the competition.

Adam Howatson is CMO at OpenText