Infonomics I: Business Information Economics and Data Monetization (Coursera)

This first course in the two-part Infonomics series provides a non-technical perspective on and methods for understanding and taking advantage of information’s unique economic characteristics. Starting with dissecting whether the information is or isn’t an asset or even property, students will begin to appreciate the challenges and opportunities with treating it as one. Then the course examines how information behaves in the context of various familiar micro-economic concepts, and what can be gleaned from this to improve the way information is managed and leveraged. This leads to exploring the various ways information can generate economic benefits—or be monetized, including how various styles of business analytics can increase information’s potential and realized value for organizations.
Course 2 of 4 in the Introduction to Business Analytics and Information Economics Specialization.
What You Will Learn
-Appreciate the unique economic, accounting, and legal characteristics of information.
-Understand and apply methods for conceiving and generating broad-based and transformative business benefits from available information assets.
-Identify and adapt traditional asset management principles and practices toward the improved management of information assets.
-Measure information’s various value characteristics to help justify or prove information-related expenditures.

Syllabus

WEEK 1
Course Orientation
You will become familiar with the course, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required for the course.
What is Information?
In this module, we are focusing on the definition of Infonomics. You will learn about the difference among Information Technology, Information Economics, and Infonomics.

WEEK 2
The Economics of Information
In this module, you will learn why information should be considered an asset. You will also learn about unique properties of information that make it different from valuable physical assets, such as oil, to which it is very often compared in the modern world to indicate the value it possesses.

WEEK 3
Methods for Monetizing Information
In this module, you will read many real-life cases that deal with monetizing information, such as Walmart optimizing search results to increase customer acquisition and retention, Trulia training neural networks to create a supplemental revenue stream, and DBS Bank developing a data solution to improve business performance. Throughout all these examples and cases, you will have a clear look at how organizations benefit from monetizing information.

WEEK 4
Applied Analytics
Through this module, you will learn about the three “Vs” of big data and how each of them affects the analytics that can be applied to your information assets and how they could be used to generate insights, recommendations, and prescriptions that can add direct economic value to the organization, i.e., how the information assets can be monetized.