October 20th, 2009 at 2:05 pm

Inversion of the Business Model

The inversion of the business model is one of the key strategies for market domination that a demand data advantage allows. Enron is our key example, in that they positioned themselves to be able to harvest more information than anyone else in the market. They were constantly making transactions with producers, and taking price and quantity information in on that side. But they were also turning around and selling that gas to consumers on the other side of their pipeline, and taking demand information from those transactions. Enron’s pipeline was a physical one for transporting gas, but also an informational one, offering them more data that any one gas producer or customer. By gleaning data from one side, Enron had a better idea of how to trade with the other. Therefore while most market participants would use their own production – how much they were selling versus their rate of production – as a hedge to protect against trading activities that might be too risky, Enron, because of their informational advantage about what was happening on both sides of the market, was using trading as a hedge against production risks. The result was that trading that could be much more profitable because they could offer prices that others would not – because they had information that others did not.

-

 

RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

  • About The Fourth Shock

    This site contains articles related to alqemyiQ CEO Ron Bienvenu's book titled The Fourth Shock.

    Bienvenu's book explores how mobility brings with it the opportunity to both interact with consumers and capture demand data in real time. These real-time interactions will change the historically reactive supply chain into a pro-active one. By leveraging this information, companies will be able to interact with consumers and pro-actively influence purchasing choices to squeeze the most profit from all parts of the supply chain.