Tired of spending hours trying to wrap your brain around your company’s Blue Ocean Strategy? Why don’t you just use Quid and calculate it?

Quid uses huge amounts of data collected from many different companies to help them figure out new business opportunities, future collaborators and plain outside-of-the-box-ideas.

The possibilities of Quid are endless: A college student might use it to decide whether to major in English or French, the Minister of Research might use it to find out where more resources are needed to promote innovation and a local design company might discover that they need to hire a biometric expert in order to follow the demands of the ever evolving needs of the consumers.

Sean Gourley, CTO at Quid with a PhD in physics from Oxford University, explains how companies as different as 23andme (online, DIY genetic testing) and pandora.com (American online genome radio) can use Quid to learn from each other. By gathering over 21.000 entities and 20 million documents describing and categorizing the different companies, Quid creates a graphic overview of the networks and clusters behind the organisations. By doing so it turns out that pandora.com and 23andme have a 6 % similarity, which is indicated by the clusters of entities (which could categories such as “consumer”, “business IT”, “online services”).

However categorizing and dividing into different buckets has never been difficult. The interesting thing about Quid is that it suggest you where to go from here; It’s the blank, white spaces between the clusters that are actually remarkable. The white spaces indicate where your company should be going and who is ready to help you get there.

Quid are now trying to do time-sequencing of their discoveries and their (almost) endless amount of data; How has the tendencies evolved over time? Can we hereby forecast trends way before they appear to the public and are there any certain patterns that we can learn from?

All in all it comes down to whether we can do better than using our gut feeling when approaching new business opportunities. Sean Gourley insists that this is the case. Leave your intuition behind and calculate your way forward!