B2B data economy – how can Evonik participate?

Data Science

Detailed description of challenge

Understanding and making use of supplier and customer (and the customer’s customer) data enables new business models that address the holistic value creation in an industrial ecosystem.
Currently, Evonik has (limited) access to external data through investment into companies, data acquisition and collaboration within the ecosystem. Each data access is realized through a separate one-on-one contractual framework.
Currently, Evonik provides external access to selected internal know how / data through online offerings that allow the customer to either find suitable products (“product finder”) or generate formulation recipes based on Evonik products.
With data economy entities like the International Data Spaces Association, leveraging data for whole ecosystems based on a data-market-approach (selling, buying and exchanging data through a professional platform) is becoming feasible also for manufacturing industries.

Challenge:

In what capacity (purchasing data, selling data, collaborating, all of the former), through which conduit (platform, one-on-one contracts, investments, …) and with what internal and external alignment (tax, accounting, legal, …) should Evonik, as a specialty chemical provider, participate in this nascent marketplace?

First initiatives within company

Selected use cases at Evonik in terms of data sourcing:

Investment: Investment into consumer data platform provider for understanding cosmetics preferences of end consumers.
Data acquisition: Purchasing water disinfection data of (end) customer to understand the value chain and influencing factors for the Customer Job To Be Done (CJTBD).
Collaboration: Utilizing chicken farming data (animal images, animal weights, farm data, …) as well as own data to steer the CJTBD.

Remark: The challenge is not dependent on the specific use cases, which are provided as examples only.

Need for support

The expected outcome of the challenge is threefold:

Overview of lessons-learned / opportunities & risks when participating in the data economy.
Overview of available options for participating in the B2B data economy.
Evaluation (advantages, disadvantages, risk, …) of participation alternatives for a specialty chemical company.

The effort should touch at least upon the following related questions:

What are current examples of data supply and demand between B2B players? What were related learnings?
Next to GAIA-X, IDSA and the Telekom DIH, what other or similar solutions / approaches for facilitating the data economy are available?
What role will / does open source data play in the B2B data economy?
How would a company internal data infrastructure look like to optimally participate in the data economy?
When treating data as an asset or potentially pricing data, what are the implications on tax, data governance, accounting, legal,
Would Evonik, as a specialty chemical provider, be predominantly a consumer or a provider of data?
Should Evonik try to utilize externally provided platforms and structures (like the Telekom DIH), engage intermediaries (like EY) or work on a case-by-case contractual approach (in-house)?

The need for support is hence related to building a general concept and approach, which only in the next step (not necessarily part of the challenge) could potentially be piloted on an existing or new use case. For added clarity, this challenge is not about making use of the data (analytics).

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Evonik Industries AG

Evonik is one of the world leaders in specialty chemicals. The company is active in more than 100 countries around the world and generated sales of €13.1 billion and an operating profit (adjusted EBITDA) of €2.15 billion in 2019. Evonik goes far beyond chemistry to create innovative, profitable and sustainable solutions for customers. More than 32,000 employees work together for a common purpose: We want to improve life, today and tomorrow.

Challengebeendet!