The fourth industrial revolution has influenced the increase in data-driven business models. Organizations regularly generate a ton of data from every department using modern technologies. Each firm has realized that data is a crucial asset and use them in several applications.
The latest developing stories indicate that blockchain technology can open the door for firms to be paid for their data.
Unfortunately, this is not just for every other company existing around. Several small businesses and start-ups don’t have access to resources and infrastructure for collecting and analyzing crucial data.
But well-established organizations can deploy blockchain technology to monetize their data and sell relevant data to other businesses. Using this approach, such organizations can generate new sources of revenue for their business.
Now, let’s look at how companies can monetize data using blockchain technology.
Collect and Analyze Data
Companies can deploy modern technologies like IoT and big data to speed up the collection and analysis of data. Every business procedure and online activity generates a huge amount of data. Firms can collect various forms of real-time and historical data such as operational data, employee data, social media data, and customer data.
Organizations can analyze such data to obtain insights into their business operations, employee performance, and customer demographics. Big data can process huge quantities of data at high speed to generate accurate results.
Therefore, big data can be used across various industry sectors like manufacturing, finance, retail, healthcare, and several more. For example, in retail, firms can collect social media, feedback, and customer details to create personalized marketing campaigns for particular customer demographics.
With big data, businesses can analyze huge data sets from various sources to create complex data models. Business leaders can use such data models to predict upcoming market trends and create strategies for adapting to such trends.
Some of the important strategies consist of actionable steps to work on inventory requirements, sales, marketing, and production. Moreover, businesses can use big data to make decisions about product pricing and launch.
IoT
Smart cities and many businesses have deployed IoT devices for several applications. For instance, firms can install IoT sensors to monitor production flow, from the refining process to the final procedures like packaging, in real-time.
Besides big data, businesses can use IoT to get more accurate results. Analysis of such data assists companies in measuring and understanding various business procedures. In retail stores, for example, IoT sensors can be installed within shelves to notify business managers when products are running out.
The sensors can gather data, which can help business managers to understand which products in high demand, which days customers purchase most products, and at which time the shelves go empty. Business managers can use such insights to make critical decisions about product orders, inventory management, and discounts.
Monetize Data
To monetize their data and increase profits, business leaders need to develop an effective strategy. They can consider applying the following steps in their strategy:
1. Business leaders need to identify different types of data and also use cases. They can collect different types of data from different courses like the web cloud, IoT devices, and social media.
Each firm specializes in gathering specific types of data based on their use cases. For example, healthcare organizations gather data concerning hospitals, medicines, treatments, disorders, doctors, and patients.
It is upon business leaders to identify types of data their businesses want to collect and what insights can be drawn from the collected data.
For instance, data gathered by healthcare organizations can be utilized by pharmaceutical firms to understand which medicines are in demand and plan for the inventory and production requirements.
Therefore, business leaders need to recognize all potential use cases of their data so that to maximize the revenues of their data monetization.
2. Based on the use cases, businesses can identify prospective buyers for their data. Buyers can be well-established organizations or startups.
For example, retailers collect extensive customer data, which can be useful for other companies in the manufacturing industry for use cases such as improving product quality based on analysis of customer demographics and their purchase patterns.
Also, interested buyers can be big players who are planning to expand their business into different sectors. For instance, if an electronic manufacturing firm is planning to enter the telecom market, the firm may purchase crucial data from a telecom company to speed up its expansion.
3. Blockchain technology has the capacity to share and monetize data. For businesses to monetize their data, they need to adopt a blockchain network for data storage and exchange. Decentralized blockchain networks will record each case-in-point of data exchange and encrypt all the data.
Firms can install multiple blockchain wallets for blockchain-based storage. They can store various forms of data from many sources in a variety of wallets to separate huge quantities of data.
Such blockchain wallets are encoded and install a protected authentication mechanism to restrict the access of data. Organizations can then employ these wallets to share data with prospective buyers.
Furthermore, businesses can use smart contracts to verify the documents and credentials of their buyers, automatically share relevant data, and obtain payment. With this approach, businesses can, therefore, implement an automatic data monetization process.
Takeaway
For years, the data curated by several organizations were piling up in the database without generating any single cent. Its existence was meaningless, until now. Thanks to blockchain technology, companies can monetize their data and earn out of it.
In this way, well-established organizations can employ blockchain to create data useful for other businesses to develop themselves and address their issues.