Do you have an Open Data strategy?

So you have embarked on a digital transformation strategy and as part of this strategy you also intend to become more innovative and maybe even collaborate with startups... Great!

This is definitely one way you can innovate. Collaborating with startups or with other companies falls under what I would call open innovation as you are not only relying on your own employees or resources to innovate but you are also calling on external entities to support you in that process. This is a form crowdsourcing, as you are crowdsourcing for talent, ideas or industry specific solutions.

Developing an open-innovation mindset

In order to succeed with open innovation, you need above all be willing to share and exchange. This is not always easy in corporate environments where most of the information remains locked down and is not open to the public. So this journey starts with a mindset change!

A mindset where you are willing to talk about your challenges, about industry challenges. This is a mindset where you share insights with startups, where you have to review what should be kept secret and what needs to be opened-up.

In a sense what I am trying to say here is that you should start by defining your innovation objectives based on current and future challenges, but also think about what data could be valuable for anybody that would like to a crack at the problem. Finding relevant solutions often requires deep insights on the industry or the problem itself... And corporates sit on huge amounts of data, but they often lack the skills to harvest that data.

Here we are talking about something bigger than doing analytics on your marketing campaigns or customer experience KPIs, it is about combining data sets, identifying new patterns and experimenting with new value propositions and business models.

Open Data is the key to unlock the potential of open-innovation

I truly believe that the key to innovation is to have solid insights. For startups this is often done through a lot of experimentation, fast failing and frequent validation.... but this process can be accelerated by leveraging the data somebody else has already collected en-mass and with good quality. This is the main thing corporates should think about offering to startups, access to data, access to markets.

Unfortunately when corporates define their digital transformation strategy they mostly look internally. They might have a solid data strategy for rationalizing IT systems and consolidating data, but the part that is often missed when working on a data strategy is the opening of that data for innovation, and open-innovation in particular.

In early stages startups are really dying for access to the right data. Corporates need to be become better at providing access to that data. This is a very good bait to catch-up a nimble and agile fish that could transform your business.

Open Data helps to develop and transform eco-systems: 1+1=3

Another thing that corporates (and governments alike) tend to miss is that the largest value is created at the intersection of industries, at the intersection of business verticals. Collaborating with other players to open-up and share data is even more critical when trying to develop new eco-systems or when attempting to transform existing ones.

So your data strategy needs to stretch beyond the boundaries of your corporate, you also need to think about the data you need to take the wanted position in your industry. Collaborating on opendata with key partners in the eco-system can become critical for each of the players involved.

Assess your opendata maturity

I spent the last couple of years, on and off, looking at opendata initiatives and I feel this area is still maturing. Few guidelines are available today, and that is why I thought it could be interesting to share a simple tool for assessing your opendata strategy.

I divided this assessment in 4 areas: Data Availability, Data Quality, Data Accessibility and Data Adoption. The reason I decided to segment it like that is because I see a lot of "lip-service" when it comes to opendata.

I see a quite a few Governments that decide to collect the data, but then make it mainly and only available to internal teams to visualize and consume the data. In the assessment methodology I am proposing they might score well on data availability and quality, but would score very low on data accessibility and adoption.

The issue is usually that access for external teams and startups is cumbersome (excel files), the data might be old (1-2y years old), there are no API's, the API's might be throttled...

The actual value created will only come if we have a lot of quality data, that is accessible. The actual value of open data will be proven through a high adoption only.

Opendata at the Open Consulting Group

At the Open Consulting Group we aim to help corporates and governments in their digital transformation initiatives. We have talents in digital transformation, data management and innovation. We value transparency and open collaboration and this is why I believe we can also make an impact in Open-Innovation and Open-data initiatives.

If you are still wondering why you should have an opendata strategy don't hesitate to reach out to us! We would also love to hear your own thoughts on digital transformation, data strategies and opendata in particular. What challenges are you facing? What opportunities do you see?

If you want to hear more about digital disruption and innovation you can also contact me at [email protected] or check our website www.innoopolis.com

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