Insights

Thinking on data
products and disruption

Strategy reviews, industry analysis, and honest assessments of what is happening in data-rich sectors. Written by the ice cream & data team and published free on Substack.

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Recent writing

Strategy

AI and the content industry: what the data actually shows

Three years of disruption, one pattern: the organisations that moved first on data infrastructure are pulling away from the rest.

May 2026  ·  8 min read
Product

Why most data strategies fail at the product stage

Strategy documents are not products. The gap between the two is where most organisations get stuck — and where we spend most of our time.

April 2026  ·  6 min read
Industry

The case for rights data infrastructure in music

Music rights data is among the most complex in any creative industry. Here is why solving it matters — and what a real solution looks like.

March 2026  ·  10 min read
Public Sector

The NHS data opportunity: lessons from the inside

We spent three years building inside the NHS. Here is what most commentators get wrong about health data — and what the real constraints actually are.

February 2026  ·  12 min read
Publishing

From catalogue to API: how publishers are finally monetising their backlist

The backlist has always been publishing's most undervalued asset. AI training data markets are changing that — but only for publishers who have their data in order.

January 2026  ·  7 min read
Strategy

Free strategy review: is your data product ready to scale?

A diagnostic framework drawn from our Accelerator programme. Eleven questions that will tell you whether your data product has a commercial model problem, a data quality problem, or a distribution problem.

December 2025  ·  5 min read
Transport

Mobility data as a commercial product: what TfL got right

Most transit agencies treat their operational data as a cost. Transport for London turned theirs into a revenue stream. The difference was not technology — it was intent.

November 2025  ·  9 min read
Product

Data quality is a product problem, not an engineering problem

Every data product failure we have ever investigated has had bad data quality somewhere in the story. But the cause is almost never the engineering team. Here is where it actually starts.

October 2025  ·  6 min read
Higher Education

Universities are sitting on the world's most valuable research data. Almost none of them know what to do with it.

A research university generates decades of structured, validated, longitudinal data. The commercial opportunity is significant. The organisational barriers are real but solvable.

September 2025  ·  11 min read
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