Digital Economics Effect #1: Marginal Costs Flatten

Since data never depletes, never wears out and can be reused against an unlimited number of use cases at near-zero marginal cost, reusing "curated" data and analytic modules reduce the marginal costs for future use cases (see Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4: Effect #1: Marginal Costs of Digital Assets Flatten

For organizations to realize the economic benefits of Effect #1, they must actively work to stomp out data silos that inhibit the sharing of organizational data. This is the biggest inhibitor of the economic value of data, as discussed in Chapter 4, University of San Francisco Economic Value of Data Research Paper. Sharing and reusing the "curated" data enables the organization to exploit the data lake to flatten marginal costs. "Curated" data is a dataset in which investments have been made to improve the data's cleanliness, completeness, accuracy, granularity, and latency; in which the...