Loadsmart is eight years old. Celonis is 11. Collibra is 14.

What do these companies have in common?

1. They're unicorns.

2. They promote data literacy.

3. They use OKRs.

Last week I shared the stage with Stijn (Stan) Christiaens, co-founder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, on a fireside chat at France Digitale Day.

At some point, we discussed category creation.

Ryan Law says, "Category creation is not an act of true creation but rather an exercise in positioning." You see the need in the market, have an entirely new solution, and get in front of the movement.

👉 When you create a category, you're educating the market on a problem they didn't know they had and a solution they didn't know they needed.

In the early days, Collibra positioned itself as semantic data integration. Now, they've positioned themselves in the data intelligence space. In Stijn's words, "We believe a business will have to take ownership and responsibility over the asset which is called data." It makes sense. Data is the currency of our digital lives.

👉 Don't conflate category creation with first mover advantage.

First mover advantage is a marketing strategy where a product or service gains a competitive advantage by being the first to market. Sometimes this is the case with category creation, but many times it's not. Robert Anderson developed the first crude electric vehicle in 1832. Today, Tesla is the leading global producer of plug-in electric vehicles.

👉 The sweet spot for a category-creating company to go public is six to ten years after a company is founded.

There are three phases to the category lifecycle—define, develop, and dominate. Category kings or queens, controlling 76% of the category economics, reap the rewards. Companies that go public between six and ten years after being founded created more than 95% of the market cap for all technology companies founded since 2000.

👉 A high-functioning flywheel makes category creation work.

This flywheel is a combination of product or service innovation, business model innovation, and making use of big data about future category demand. Companies learning to experiment struggle with inefficient decision-making or decisions informed by past experience. The results are the organization cannot identify critical risks, bad ideas stick around (sucking up scarce resources), and teams cannot take on more-transformative bets.

👉 You need a modern operating model to win.

An operating model drives value creation and strategy execution across an organization. It represents the guiding principles of operations: how different parts of a business should work together to deliver value to customers and stakeholders. At @gtmhub, we believe businesses need a modern operating model. Those that can close the strategy execution gap are not mere category contenders, they set themselves up as category kings and queens.

❓Want to learn more? Check out our article, What is The Modern Operating Model? https://gtmhub.com/resources/articles/what-is-the-modern-operating-model