Innovation in government services: The case of open data

Abstract

Governments are initiating open data initiatives as a new approach where external stakeholders can play an increased role in the innovation of government services. This is unlike previous approaches of e-government service innovation where services are solely initiated and developed by the agencies themselves. However, despite public agencies actively promoting the use of their data by organizing events such as challenge competitions, the response from external stakeholders to leverage government data for innovative activities has been lacking. This raises the question about the reasons inhibiting the interest to innovate using open data. Yet, the existing literature points to a lack of understanding about external stakeholders’ willingness to innovate with the data provided. Motivated thus, this paper aims to identify the antecedents of the willingness of external stakeholders to innovate with open data. We propose the use of the case study methodology for this purpose.