Strategy for Data: Open it or Hack it?

Abstract

The open data ventures can be summarized in a way that companies are reluctant to share their data with anyone, whereas governments open their data for citizens, institutions, and businesses as much as they can. However, this principle is changing, since there is added value in the digital information and datasets the companies possess and they are slowly understanding the value of crowdsourcing. In order to engage external experts, companies are reluctant to open their data, but they are interested in hosting hackathons. Hackathons are seen as a valuable direction to engage developers with private data. In this article, we observed and analyzed different industry cases for strategies and opinions on how and why organizations arrange hackathon events to extract information from their data, and how this relates to the popular open data movement. Our results indicate that hackathons offer more control and practical solutions over the fundamental open data approach. It would seem that hackathons provide better inroads for the companies to monetize their datasets and information assets, while open data could bring more visibility to the brand.