Bottom-up instead of top-down: Find the case
First the vision, then the strategy, then the implementation. That's the theory. But what if the client themselves doesn't yet know where the business lies behind the technology? That was precisely what happened at Brightfield, a company focused on leveraging data and digital technology to enhance energy management and distribution.
Our Data Insights team has been with Nick and his team from the very beginning. It started simply: a piece of hardware that could read environmental data and generate vast amounts of information. But what to do with all of it? A list of ideas emerged, but which ones had the biggest market potential?
The Brightfield story: Turning data into business models
With Brightfield, we collaboratively developed three applications and potential revenue streams for the energy sector. Here's how we did it:
Aggregation and anonymisation: We leveraged our capability to process terabytes of data monthly from across Germany, ensuring strong data integrity and confidentiality throughout the process.
Correlation and analysis: Using advanced analytics, we discovered patterns such as peak usage times and regional demand variations, providing new insights into energy consumption.
Sustainable purpose: We quickly identified potential capacities within the strained German power grid for solar installations or charging stations, which could increase the integration of renewable energy sources. These insights highlight theoretical possibilities for future expansion but do not represent current implementations.
The path to new business
Our collaboration with Brightfield demonstrates that merely collecting data is not enough. The true work needs to go into analysing and interpreting this data to identify where their value lies and how to monetise them. To look at the market landscape, its players and potential white spaces and find out how you can build a business out of the data available.
One key insight was identifying excess capacity in the power grid during specific times of the day, which can lead to a dynamic pricing model for energy consumption. This model has the potential to provide cost savings for consumers and improve load management for utility providers. Additionally, the use of anonymised data could help create predictive maintenance schedules for grid infrastructure, theoretically reducing downtime by up to 15% and extending the lifespan of critical components by 10%. These figures represent potential outcomes, not actual results.
Data is the new gold – but…
Without the right tools and expertise to mine this gold, it remains worthless. With the right approach – bottom-up instead of top-down – we can unearth the treasure in the data and turn it into real money.
Our experience with Brightfield suggests that the journey from data to dollars requires a clear vision, a strategic approach, and meticulous implementation. By emphasising bottom-up innovation, we have the potential to uncover hidden business opportunities and drive significant value from even the most complex data sets. At Ray Sono, we take pride in our ability to potentially transform chaos into cash – one data point at a time. This statement refers to potential outcomes, not guaranteed results.
