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Over the last decade, data has risen to the top of national and global policy agendas, as nations seek to develop their economies, use data to address social challenges and respond to citizen concerns about the uses and abuses of data. Data has become the infrastructure on which modern economies are built. The growing ubiquity and abundance of data make it vital in every sector, and businesses of every size increasingly depend on it. Against this backdrop, open data has the potential to create significant value for society and the economy when leveraged in partnership with the private sector. At the same time, the reuse of open data in Europe is still in its infancy and requires further research and implementation efforts to fully express its potential for public and private value creation. The content of this discussion paper goes in this direction and provides a review of the research conducted over the past two decades on how information generated by the public sector and released in an open data format may purposely be re-used by for-profit and not-for-profit private entities. The overarching intent is to identify relevant lessons learnt and principles that may be useful in promoting the flourishing of sustainable open data ecosystems across Europe. The analysis shows how open data reuse may be regarded as a multi-billion and multi-dimensional opportunity for European corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups, with the potential to unlock value-generation processes impacting the top and bottom lines of companies' balance sheets and the well-being of society at large. Businesses making use of open data in their activities can benefit from favourable economics that may exert a positive impact on their profitability once a sufficient level of competitive advantage is generated. Sources of competitive advantage may vary depending on the type of barriers encountered during the processes of data acquisition and analysis, and can come from the combination of open data with company-specific assets (skills, data, relationships, etc.) or the adoption of innovative business models relying on emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, in fact, represent useful technological evolutions in supporting the sharing, reuse and monetisation of open data, contributing to a smarter, more secure and automated data economy. The design of value propositions leveraging open data usually requires a resource-based approach where three strategic decisions need to be made in order to define a complete business model. Namely, the type of elaboration needed, the role of the knowledge generated in the final product or service and, finally, the pricing mechanism. The review of the literature conducted on business models for open data allowed us to identify 14 business models that may be clustered into five broad categories: freemium, premium, cost-saving, indirect benefit and razor-blade.
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