Ordinary delivery of the product or service generates data as a by-product. The company keeps the right to use that data and puts it to work beyond the transaction that produced it, in a separate product or for a separate buyer.
How Data Exhaust works
The core business pays for collection, so each further use of the data adds little collection cost. The data is exclusive only when a rival cannot collect it the same way. A larger core business produces more exhaust, but the exhaust does not by itself enlarge the core business. The asset is most valuable when it joins data streams that are worth little apart and are unique together.
How companies won with Data Exhaust
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. ASCO CancerLinQ · 2014–22
Flatiron Health
Sell the same data to every drugmaker
What it did
Pfizer from 2014; Roche's 2016 purchase agreement non-exclusive
ASCO CancerLinQ
Licensed the database to two vendors for fixed annual payments (December 2017)
What data does ordinary delivery produce, what right does the company keep to it, and what further use or buyer does it serve that a rival without the same delivery could not match?
Who names it
Author
What they call it / where it appears
Abraham Thomas +
Data exhaust: data collected or generated as a by-product of the core business
Casado & Lauten +
Data scale effects, as distinct from data network effects
Note. When the further use is improving the product for other users, that is Data network effects, not this tag. Data Gravity concerns the customer's own record serving the customer's further uses; exhaust is data the company keeps and uses beyond that customer. Data bought, licensed, scraped or collected as the product itself does not qualify. When exhaust supports a defense, tag the defense separately (Accumulated assets, Scope economies, Cornered resource). Record whether the company joins data streams no single rival holds together (Thomas's unification): in the first corpus pass it separated Tempus (joined molecular and clinical records) from Flatiron and Sermo (one stream each). A second buyer whose interest runs against the users who produced the data is a known failure (Sermo).