Under the headlines of Globalization and Internet Economy a massive structural change has taken place in many industries during the last ten years. Companies have moved away from physical production and the execution of simple transactions towards immaterial value creation based on information and knowledge exchange. On the one hand, production and transaction processes have to a large extent developed into highly optimized ‘commodities’ that offer little differentiation poten­tial to many companies. It is thus a logical consequence that production capacities are often shifted to suppliers from low-wage countries and standardized business processes are taken on by service providers in the form of business process outsourcing. 

On the other hand, the flood of information available on the Internet, particularly in the era of Web 2.0, is seen to be an endless source of innovation potential and new data-centric business models. These are based either entirely or at least to an essential extent on the collection, aggregation and distribution of data and information. Pioneers and shining examples of this approach are Google and eBay. However, many traditional companies have also succeeded in making their established products richer and more valuable by adding a supplemental “data sphere”. The sports shoe company Nike for example has worked with Apple to set up an information and data world around their core product on the basis of the iPod Sport Kit and the Web page Nikeplus (www.nikeplus.com). To date no competitor has been able to copy this approach. It represents a significant market differentiator with strong customer reten­tion potential. Later we will have a closer look at this and other examples.  

In a previous research study¹ (¹ C. Tempich and V. Rieger, „Data-centric business models“, Detecon Opinion Paper, 10/2007) we demonstrated that the profitability of companies following data-centric business models can be more than twice as high as that of their otherwise comparable competitors.