What do Uber, Airbnb, Wikipedia and Spotify all have in common?
Transport, lodging, encyclopaedia and music?
Our answer: They reshaped stale industries by adding digital capabilities and value.
Rating of suppliers by customers – and vice versa
Ease of finding, comparing and locating
Easy and low-cost access to an enormous supply
Easy access to information and meta-information
Crowdsourcing and crowd-verification of content
The core product might not always be that different from before, but they made it easier to access, choose and use. In doing so, they reinvented entire industries and toppled giants.
Digital product passports are about adding metadata too. Just other kinds of added digital value.
In essence, the digital product passports that the European Union is set on requiring to accompany all products sold in the EU aren't that different: It's about building a system for easy access to metadata about physical products. Not any metadata, though, but data on circularity, repairability and environmental impact from cradle to grave of those products. We still don't know exactly which types of data that will be required but, by all accounts, it looks as if it will require a major effort to collect them, to verify them and to maintain.
Why stop at the mandated meta data? Why not add commercial value while you're at it?
Obviously, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the effort of getting your data in order to live up to the requirements by the EU, but we suggest a different mindset: How about thinking like Uber, Airbnb, Wikipedia and Spotify? "For what else can we leverage the methods to deliver the meta-data required by the EU? Which other meta-data can we provide that will make our products stand out from the crowd? That will make them easier to find, use, handle....? Meta-data or value that may boost sales or open up to added sales revenue."
Only You can answer those questions, but it takes the mindset of a challenger, a disruptor.
Is that you? Are you the one who will reshape your industry while the others unwillingly struggle to merely comply with new legislation?
Photo credits: Humonia on iStock Photos