I’d like to see a website that consists of an interactive tree, displaying which company owns which other companies / brands. For instance, show that Pepsi owns Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats, and Tropicana (among many others), and then show that Quaker Oats in turn owns Cap’n Crunch, Aunt Jemima Syrups (but not frozen foods), Rice-A-Roni, Gatorade, and so on. Direct ownership would be considered a strong link.
You could also show weak links, such as person A sits on the board for company X and Y, or investment firm Q owns a large percentage of company J and K. For instance, Indra Nooyi, who is the CEO of PepsiCo is also a Class B director of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, as is Jeffrey R. Immelt, who is the CEO of GE. GE owns NBC and Universal Studios. NBC co-owns MSNBC with Microsoft. Denis M. Hughes is a Class C director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve and he’s also President of the New York State AFL-CIO. And James Dimon is a Class A director on the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, and he’s CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, which owns Chase. And on, and on, and on.
Ideally you would show all of this in visual, interactive form (click on a company and it expands out its associations). Bonus points if you use corporate logos to represent each brand/company. It could look something like this for showing the connections listed above, and a couple more:
In photo shopping that graphic, I’d say there’s already a need for a way to show/hide some things so it’s not just enormous, and the links probably need directional arrows to show who owns who, and maybe labels to show what exactly the relationship is. You would probably also need a way to decide which way is up (market cap?), and how to space things, because in the above, it looks like Microsoft and Pepsi are closely linked since they’re next to each other, but they’re actually fairly far apart (as far as I can tell).
If you’re really ambitious, you could also show links through things like business partnerships (companies linked to Microsoft through large scale licensing deals), memberships in various professional consortiums (like the W3C or the IEEE), or ongoing advertising deals (Target Field / the Twins). You could also show who competes with who in what market. That would be really interesting.
You could also work in time phasing it. Such as, when did Pepsi acquire Quaker Oats? Who owned it before? Where did Indra Nooyi work before becoming Pepsi CEO? It becomes a sort of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon after not too long. Which is really a little scary in its own way. Throw in political campaign contributions and we’re really cooking with fire.
I admittedly only know a very small subset of how different companies relate to each other, but I always find it fascinating and I think there’s a fair number of people who would like to know more about this kind of thing, so you’ve got an audience. I’m not sure how freely available this kind of information is, but I would assume it’s public knowledge for any publicly traded company (all the stuff I used to make this post is from Wikipedia and reasonably easy to trace). It would just be a matter of finding and organizing the data, and then presenting it in a more understandable manner than how it currently exists.
Of my free ideas so far, this is the one that I’ve gone back and forth the most on actually doing, so if you do give it a try, let me know, I’d be glad to work on it some. If I ever find myself bored or just in need of a break, I might work on it some anyway. So, this one’s more of a “half free but I’m still holding on to it a little bit” idea. Perhaps a “partnership idea Friday”.