Using Nevermined to Commercialize Your Organization’s Data

From traditional sales to bounties to Digital Inversion. Learn how to extract value from your data assets via Nevermined’s numerous commercialization models.

There are many ways to commercially leverage Nevermined, including more “traditional” business model approaches, as well as novel approaches like those related specifically to governance and ecosystem dynamics.

These commercialization techniques can be applied at varying levels. One strategy is to deploy Nevermined in an intra-organizational setting where internal, disparate business units monetize their assets to exchange with other business units. Another strategy involves an inter-organizational approach within consortium-controlled or open networks where non-affiliated actors share and trade their assets.

The following is a summary of some of the types of commercial opportunities facilitated by Nevermined.

Asset Tokenization

Nevermined’s value creation proposition is significantly influenced by the solution’s asset tokenization capabilities. Effectively, any asset of any type within the ecosystem can theoretically be tokenized, including data assets, services, Artificial Intelligence algorithms, the expertise of the system participants, etc.

The tokenization of assets results in the emergence of what could be described as a new asset class for organizations. Nevermined enables the monetization of an organization’s assets through its tokenization technology, which can provide token issuance for any type of asset. The resulting new Assets Under Management (AUMs) can be treated like any other organizational asset (i.e. capital, shares, bonds, real estate, etc.), and therefore leveraged for maximum impact and growth. With this idea in mind, Nevermined can assist all business units, but in particular IT, in moving away from its purely traditional role as a Cost Center, to a driving force behind transformational growth as a Profit Center.

The following assets can be tokenized by Nevermined participants: (Please note this is not an exhaustive list.)

• Existing Data — Existing data assets can be tokenized in order to facilitate transactions on these assets. This tokenization could manifest as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) representing a specific data asset and/or the access parameters to a certain dataset or class of assets. Alternatively, a fungible token (i.e. standard ERC-20) could be issued and coupled to a specific class of usage, length of access, etc., for any data asset in the ecosystem. Regardless of the token type, a value can be assessed to any token (and therefore any data asset) in order to facilitate bid/ask functionality in a marketplace setting. Generally speaking, because they already exist, these data assets would have discrete ownership by a single entity.
• New Data — Nevermined assists in the creation of new data assets through its decentralized query, computation, and federated learning capabilities. Through this decentralized analysis capability, Nevermined can facilitate the creation of net-new datasets, and these assets can be tokenized. Similar to pre-existing data, this tokenization could manifest as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) representing a specific dataset and/or the access parameters to a certain asset or class of assets. Alternatively, a fungible token (i.e. standard ERC-20) could be issued to represent a specific class of usage, length of access, etc., for any data asset in the ecosystem. Regardless of the token type, a value can be assessed to any token (and therefore any data asset) in order to facilitate bid/ask functionality in a marketplace setting.
• Jointly Owned New Data — Because of Nevermined’s high fidelity provenancial integrity, in the case where multiple parties contribute to the creation of a new asset, each contributing party can be properly attributed and correspondingly compensated for their contribution. For example, if two data owners allow for a 3rd party analyst to perform analysis across their distinct datasets, and this results in a net-new data asset, each of the original data owners plus the 3rd party analyst can have ownership of the result set attributed based on their value contribution, which can result in fair compensation for each respective party if/when the asset is monetized.
• Algorithms — As an asset, algorithms can be tokenized within Nevermined to facilitate their transactability, sharing, and monetization. Similar to data assets, this tokenization can be in the form of fungible or non-fungible tokens. By facilitating algorithm tokenization, Nevermined provides for proper attribution to analytic applications like AI and ML models. Consequently, data scientists and advanced analytics organizations can monetize their assets and receive fair compensation based on measurable usage metrics.
• Services — Like algorithms, services can also be tokenized, including storage and computation functions. For instance, access to an intermediary 3rd party aggregation storage facility in a federated learning application could be tokenized. Additionally, federated and machine learning applications themselves, with algorithm and associated computation environments, can be containerized and represented by a token. Consequently, such computation services can be transacted within Nevermined.
• Orchestration Pipelines — The orchestration of solutions, combining data with algorithms and associated compute infrastructure, as well as triggers to other services, can be packaged and tokenized. This provides experts like data engineers, data curators, and service organizations the ability to tokenize their offerings and transact with service consumers in the ecosystem in a purely digital fashion.
• Standards — Established standards for ontologies and domain specific schemas can be tokenized for monetization. This will facilitate conformity through mechanisms like subscription to standards, or through incentivization. The result will be improved discovery and trust for assets that conform with specific, verified standards.
• Expertise/Knowledge — The ability to tokenize expertise is also possible with Nevermined. In this case, experts, organizations, and hubs (i.e. Kaggle) can be represented by NFTs, where access for services can be claimed by holding the service’s respective service token, with transaction history being used to establish quality and reputation. Similarly, AI bots can be tokenized and leveraged for services within a Nevermined ecosystem. For example, curation expertise, such as 3rd party data discovery, data standardization, and ontological mapping, can each be tokenized in its own right, packaged for consumption and transacted upon within the confines of Nevermined.

Business Models

Business model value creation with Nevermined extends from contemporary-style applications like new business enablement and cost displacement, to the more avant-garde possibilities related to tokenization and marketplaces. Below is a summary of some of the value creation opportunities available to Nevermined users.

New Lines of Business

Research suggests that data-driven businesses will naturally outcompete companies which do not place user generated and 3rd party data at the center of their product or service offerings. Today’s most valuable businesses can be seen as enormous, data intensive structures. What makes them valuable is how they turn this data into actionable insights that drive increased revenues.

If we conceptualize organizations as a collection of data structures, Nevermined makes it possible for these structures to merge all or part of their data to build new kinds of products and services in unprecedented fashion. Beyond the merging of data structures, Nevermined also offers a governance and monetization framework which lets untrusted parties be confident about ownership, reward distribution, access control, and privacy.

With the ability to access new and novel data, as well as services, skills and expertise, organizations are able to open up the possibility of creating new economic opportunities. Case in point is an opportunity that emerges between a multinational Telco and a multinational Insurance Provider, creating a joint venture in which data sharing will enable the creation of new products under a new joint venture. However, this type of opportunity is not limited solely to the Telco and the Insurer. The same model can be extended to other domains and industries like Energy, Banking, Retail, etc. Not to mention the types of value propositions that can be created in conjunction with 3rd party analytics providers.

Such ventures could lead to the emergence of undiscovered business models, including using Nevermined to create net-new LoBs with partners that would not have been possible in the past.

Line of Business Evolution — IT Change Management: From Cost Center to Profit Center

The ability to monetize assets provides a unique organizational opportunity, especially for IT to evolve its core business offering. Historically, IT has been subject to the demands and requirements of other business units. Often the measure of value is attributed purely to cost displacement or efficiencies of scale.

However, with the emergence of tokenized assets, IT now has the ability to commercialize their investments. With the ability to monetize assets, at scale, IT can begin to recoup its CapEx and OpEx by commoditizating its assets under management. This will lead to new lines of revenue for the organization, a fact that will interest not just the CIO, but also the CFO and CEO.

No longer does IT need to maintain its historical reputation as a sink for CapEx and OpEx, but can now emerge as an organization’s growth engine, selling and trading its assets for value. This turns IT from a Cost Center into a Profit Center.

Risk Mitigation

Nevermined can improve an organization’s business outlook and compliance through general risk mitigation as it relates to both regulation and insurance requirements.

Regulatory Compliance

One of the core attributes of Nevermined is its holistic provenancial integrity and the resulting high fidelity data lineage and attribution capabilities. Because of Nevermined’s transparency, it is easy to establish where assets are coming from, who is using them, and for what they are being used for. As a result, regulatory and compliance constraints are diminished. Regulation is essentially a manifestation of a lack of control. Nevermined provides this missing control.

Consequently, by increasing provenancial integrity, Nevermined helps reduce regulatory risk and the associated issue of significant penalties. For instance, because Nevermined allows the data to remain in-situ within the provider’s infrastructure when being analyzed, solutions do not require the same level of data consolidation as traditionally needed. The results are two fold: first, Nevermined removes the “Honey Pot” risk that comes with data consolidation. Second, the role of solution providers and/or third parties is limited, resulting in their function as Data Processors only under GDPR. This means that the more precarious Data Controller role remains where it should, at its point of origin with the data provider.

Combine this GDPR-style role reversal with the combined functionality of direct regulatory “reporting” and Nevermined again helps to limit an organization’s exposure to regulatory non-compliance. This is due to the open nature of a Nevermined ecosystem in which an existing industry regulator(s) can be included as an actor in the system, possibly even paying to access the other participant’s assets. As such, regulators can potentially gain clearer insights into how organizations are behaving. This, in turn, can help all parties in governing the ecosystem.

Insurance Compliance

A subset of the larger regulatory compliance and risk mitigation strategy is insurance compliance for organizations, and the associated reduction of cost that can be achieved. By providing greater transactional fidelity, automating access control, and higher reporting transparency, Nevermined provides greater risk analysis capabilities to an organization’s insurance providers. This clarity can help substantiate positions and claims, which result in reduced insurance premiums.

Additionally, like the regulators in the ecosystem, insurers can also be included as actors in the system. In this case, the insurance providers will be able to see metadata about the transactions taking place in the ecosystem. The insurer could pay individual providers for the additional data they need in order to make better assessments or to create new products for ecosystem participants. For example, the MNC Insurance Provider could pay the Telco not just for telemetry data about customers, but also specific data around asset purchases the Telco is making. The benefit to the Telco would be improved insurance policy pricing, lower premiums, better products, etc.

Cost Displacement

Organizations are constantly looking at ways to displace costs, improve margins, and reduce overhead. Nevemined offers two innovative approaches to traditional cost displacement methodologies.

Automation

Nevermined automates numerous processes, procedures, and workflows, specifically those related to the access and control of assets. Coupled with high fidelity data provenance and attribution, Nevermined can streamline requests for assets and the associated access. Nevermined also facilitates automated deployment of computation and storage environments.

The result is a solution that disintermediates traditional administration of assets, which helps drive down OpEx. With Nevermined’s Service Execution Agreement smart contract technology, access to assets is automatically provided to those meeting the requisite access parameters. No longer is an administrator required to gate-keep an organization’s assets. For example, take the following traditional data asset access control workflow:

1. Requestor requests access to a data asset via the data asset’s administrator;
2. The administrator validates the requestor’s authorization manually;
3. The administrator manually adds the requestor to an authorized access category in an access control system(s);
4. The requestor’s access to the asset is enabled.

This process can now be fully automated and controlled from end-to-end through smart contracts and integration with off-chain authorization and authentication systems. Consequently, these administrative resources can be reallocated elsewhere in the organizations, thus displacing a traditional cost center through automation.

Digital Inversion

Perhaps the most powerful function of Nevermined is the way it displaces centralized control and decision-making, enabling the concept we’ve dubbed Digital Inversion. A core capability of many digital natives, Digital Inversion is an organization’s ability to push solution acquisition to the edges. Digital Inversion is at the core of how Apple and Google source iPhone and Android solutions through their app stores. This capability enables these organizations to source problem solving to external actors within their respective ecosystem. The result is massive scale from both a resource and skills/knowledge point of view, as well as with overall utilization and market penetration. The fact remains that best sourced solutions attract the broadest user base.

Nevermined’s true value proposition lies in the solution’s ability to digitally invert an organization. With Nevermined, ecosystem actors are no longer limited to the skills and resources available within their organization. Rather, Nevermined participants can take full advantage of the expertise of the entire ecosystem, sourcing best-of-breed solutions from best-in-class providers. This means there are arguably zero limitations to problem solving and knowledge acquisition.

The result are solutions that are sourced from the best solution providers at the best possible price with the fastest time to market.

Marketplace

Perhaps the most attractive and novel commercial proposition presented are the marketplaces that Nevermined enables. Nevermined’s ability to tokenize any data asset, from a dataset to a data model to a computation environment to orchestration pipelines, gives ecosystem participants the opportunity to finally monetize their investments and digital assets under management.

With the explosion of data exploitation over the last 20 years, the criticality of data assets has never been more significant. However, there remains an inability for organizations to truly leverage their digital assets under management. Nevermined provides the ability to market and sell access to assets, while controlling who has access to what, in a way that is secure. Consequently, organizations now have the potential to realize tangible returns from CapEx and OpEx and create considerable new revenue streams.

Nevermined will ease actor entry into the marketplace paradigm through integrations with existing data catalog technologies, including Amundsen (Open Source) and Collibra (Closed Source; *planned). This integration will leverage the metadata acquisition and discovery capabilities of a data catalog, and introduce pricing for the catalog’s listed assets, as well as integrating automated access control. By incorporating data catalogs, Nevermined will reduce the costs associated with creating net-new marketplaces, and allow actors to begin buying and selling assets immediately through their existing solutions.

Bounties

With bounties, actors can present a challenge to an ecosystem and, if priced properly, receive a response/solution from the network. This is similar in form to traditional RFPs and SOWs, where an organization issues a request for a solution, and their known pipeline of service providers from their Prefered Supplier List are able respond and deliver an appropriate solution. Nevermined enables this service/response capability at scale, giving participants the ability to source solutions to their problems from anywhere in the ecosystem, while providing some or all of the requisite assets needed for addressing the issue.

The Bounty process can be commercialized with Nevermined in two main ways. The first is through actors selling their expertise (i.e. skill sets, computation capability, etc.) and knowledge (i.e. data, analytic models, etc.) to other ecosystem participants. The second is through cost displacement where not only the best price for a solution is achieved, but also the best-fit solution with the fastest time to market from the best available provider(s) — like an Uber for digital services.

If you would like to know more about the commercial opportunities Nevermined makes available for your organization, or are interested in having a demo, please reach out to us at info@nevermined.io or visit our website.

Originally posted on 2020-11-23 on Medium.