Value Capture

The Hidden Economics of Data Businesses. Coming in 2027.

Every data business rests on a question its owners rarely ask out loud: when the value is created, who ends up with it? The usual answer is that it goes to whoever holds the data. The book's answer is different. Value goes where the work is: to whoever does the enrichment that turns a raw record into something a buyer will pay for, again and again.

Once you see that, the businesses sort themselves. The retailer that sold its loyalty data for a fee, and the data-science company that ended up worth more than the fee ever was. The exchange that charges a rake on every trade. The airline whose loyalty programme is worth more than the airline. The publisher that licensed its archive to a model builder and found out afterwards what it had given away.

The book gives that sorting a vocabulary and a method: enrichability, the property that decides whether a data asset can be turned into a business at all; the rake, the share of the value created that the business keeps, and whether it is owned or on loan; and the five decisions that settle the rake before any negotiation begins: the call, the configuration, the boundary, the rights and the pricing.

It is written for the people who own, price, sell and buy data businesses: founders and chief executives, chief product officers, corporate development teams and the investors who back them. The cases come from the inside. I ran product at dunnhumby, the company behind Tesco Clubcard, through the years when the question of who captures the value was decided in rooms I was in.

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