Abstract
It is often claimed that we live in an information age. This has many implications for decision makers in general and business leaders in particular. For most businesses nowadays, increasingly, it is superior information that is at the origin of competitive advantage. The prime challenge in this new environment does not start with data analysis. Rather, the most important issue for the firm is to understand its information needs: what information, if it were available, would make a real difference for value creation and competitive advantage? Once the answer is clear to this question then finding information is not that hard. It is important however, that the firm doesn?t constrain itself to its own information. Indeed, in the last decades, information markets have become ubiquitous and provide opportunities way beyond the analysis of the firm?s own data. However, being effective at identifying the right information sources, understanding information suppliers? incentives and combining various, often qualitatively different sources efficiently is quite challenging. While there is little guidance readily available from the standard sources of business education, an increasing body of literature works on discovering the rules of information markets for the business world.