In 2015, not a week went by without finding articles about a new source of wealth: data. Too bad that most of these were taking up a handful of articles found in the United States, so they were talking about a phenomenon that was still little seen in Europe.
But how does a resource become income, wealth?
Human civilization has known about the existence of oil since 600 B.C. Throughout the ancient age it had very limited uses, more as a perennial fire, in the context of warfare, since water could not extinguish burning oil. It would have to wait until 1859 for the first major use, commercially speaking, for oil: the first profitable well. Demand at the time came from lighting, as it ran on whale oil, which had a particular supply chain, making it understandably expensive. Through the refining of oil, kerosene lowered the cost of lighting. Today oil has more market because it has other uses and therefore demand: energy (transportation, thanks to Diesel), materials (polymers, thanks to Giulio Natta), etc. So use values have transformed a dark viscous liquid, less dense than water, into incomes. But those use values have been discovered through chemistry (materials science), physics, geology, industrial chemistry, mechanical engineering (for vehicles), etc.
The low cost of data storage, combined with the low cost of computation enabled by Personal Computers and telecommunications, allow the industrial alchemists in modern sauce to refine data to get something abstract that lowers the decision-making costs, even those of opportunities. In fact, various products are made from petroleum, not just kerosene. In the same way that with statistical counseling you have not only potential cost reductions, but increased turnover, greater productivity, improved employee satisfaction, greater control. Again, to make data become profitable, you need computer science, statistics, data engineering, economic and noneconomic organizations (for decision makers), marketing (to analyze how to spend better) etc.
If you have a small business between 3 and 35 employees and want to make it 21st century-proof, possibly without making it dependent on OPEC of the data, we can do a free call for about 30 minutes to understand how we can together design the distillation column for your data, to create barrels of value.