Views on open data business from software development companies

Abstract

The interest towards the concept of open data has increased during the last ten years, as governments and municipalities have decided to open their data repositories. This has led to a new generation of mobile apps, which utilize this data to improve the feature richness and the overall user experience for the customers. In this study, we interviewed representatives of five software organization and discussed their views towards opening data - private and public - and also using the open data in practice. Based on our observations, the companies see very limited scope for the use of open data as a business asset: the main applications seem to gravitate towards function as an additional feature for an existing product, not a source of new innovations or business ventures. The results also illustrate on how little benefit the organizations consider to gain from opening their private data, and what alternatives there are for sharing data in a profitable manner. Additionally, as based on the observations, a strategy classification on the different data sharing methods is formulated and presented.