Open data research at Aalto University Business School

"A few months ago, myself and my colleague Dr. Juho Lindman at the Aalto University School of Economics started to explore open data academically. We are particularly interested in the business applications and economic potential of open data. So far we have done a small round of interviews in Finland with business and non-profit sector employees, and have written a couple of conference papers about the results. Interestingly, we found out that open data seemed to have a lot in common with open source from a research perspective. Now we are trying to interpret and use these similarities to better understand the phenomenon of open data and the interplay between these two concepts. We looked into open data-related services offered on the Finnish market, and tried to understand how open data-related service providers operate in order to draw a generic business model. In this process, we came to the understanding that there is no common meaning of open data shared by the different players on the market. We tried to embrace the various perceptions, and build some classification of existing meanings that industry assigns to the term “open data”. ..."