In every marketplace, new companies — and sometimes entire new industries — arise to aid in the transfer of services and products.
Such new intermediaries typically add value — sometimes in the form of ease of location and selection, authority of recommendations
or third-party objectivity, convenience, better prices through reseller agreements, greater visibility for small vendors, reduction
of complexity, packaging, ease of transactions, or resale of surplus items — in ways that vendors of discrete products or
services cannot provide or find not to be in their areas of core competence.
Your local plumbing supply store is a well-known and well-established
brick-and-mortar intermediary. In financial services, your local insurance agency eases your connection with a variety of home and
life insurance solutions — something you certainly don't want to be doing yourself. Stock trading companies let individual investors
play at the same table as wealthy banks.
In the computer industry, intermediaries like PC Connection spawned hundreds of imitators
that helped the burgeoning global market for computer hardware and software find solutions — and prices — that they might otherwise
have missed. Upstart technology vendors benefited greatly, too, because PC Connection gave them equal footing with computer giants.
But
as the complexity of life increases dramatically, some intermediaries become powerful economic forces in their own right. Banks and
investment firms create new financial instruments to compete for the consumer and corporate investment dollar. Insurance companies
provide increasingly nuanced agreements on coverage of critical disaster and health risks.
Sometimes, however, those intermediaries
become ends in themselves, powerful enough to control the scope and nature of interactions between consumers of services and goods
and providers of those services and goods. As exchanges of value become more complex in such markets, intermediaries increasingly
limit the interactions they once enabled ... and take an increasing share of the value of the transactions.
In the world of consumer
goods, companies like eBay and Craigslist buck that trend, providing direct connections — forces for disintermediation between consumers
and providers — and even open up global markets for products once considered local crafts. Everyone with something of value to sell
became a vendor — without leaving the comfort of home — and enjoyed new opportunities to purchase everything from luxury estates to
used bassoons.
That's not happening, however, in domains where the complexity of services seems to require a powerful intermediary.
One key reason for that freezing of the marketplace is complexity itself. How, for example, can the average person intelligently design
an insurance program for his or her family? How can the average person even know the right questions to ask about a chronically sore
hip, let alone find — and work directly with — a hip-replacement specialist in easy traveling distance?
The Center for Semantic Excellence addresses this challenge by creating a clear, accessible model for market forces and implementing knowledgebases that allow consumers to interact intelligently and directly with providers of vital services and products.