the service becomes for all customers. Pandora
harnesses the massive amounts of data from its
free users to refine its music recommendations. All
Flickr users benefit from a larger photo-posting
community, all Skype members from an expanded
universe of people with whom to connect.
Other companies find that when their core business
is part of a network, valuable data (sometimes
called “exhaust data”) are generated as a by-product.
MasterCard, for instance, has built an advisory
unit based on data the company gathers from its
core credit card business: it analyzes consumer
purchasing patterns and sells aggregated findings
to merchants and others that want a better reading
on buying trends. CHEP, a logistics-services
provider, captures data on a significant portion of
the transportation volume of the fastest-moving
consumer goods and is now building a transportation-
management business to take advantage of
this visibility.
Not all companies, of course, could benefit from
multisided models. But for those that can, a good
starting point for testing them is to take inventory
of all the data in a company’s businesses (including
data flowing from customer interactions) and then
ask, “Who might find this information valuable?”
Another provocative thought: “What would happen
if we provided our product or service free of
charge?” or—more important, perhaps—“What if a
competitor did so?” The responses should provide
indications of the opportunities for disruption, as well as of vulnerabilities.