Strategy & Integration Among Workflow Providers - The Scholarly Kitchen

"I recently received a phone call from a consultant who wanted to chat with me about consolidation in the scientific publishing marketplace. The conversation proceeded similarly to many others, until they got to this question, which I paraphrase: “Will Elsevier integrate Mendeley and SSRN fully — or is it going to lose interest in the pivot to workflow?” This echoed conversations I’ve had with equity analysts, who evaluate the business prospects of Elsevier and its publicly traded peers as publishers — when Elsevier, prominently, claims to have become an analytics and technology business. This raises the interesting question: How should investors and their representatives assess the strategy and prospects of these new workflow and analytics businesses? In this piece, I focus on one of the key strategic pivot points for the emerging breed of workflow providers: To what extent does their strategy indicate that they will integrate individual scholarly tools into a more coherent end-to-end researcher workflow? And, what does success in executing such a strategy look like?