Open data platforms for transformational entrepreneurship: Inclusion and exclusion mechanisms

Open data is considered an important resource to stimulate innovation and create economic and social value. Open data researchers have examined the importance of data publication by public bodies, but in contrast, much less attention has focused on how open data is exploited. In this paper, we aim to provide insight into the actions of platforms to assist open data exploitation by transformational entrepreneurs, which systemically facilitate transformation in socio-economic development. Our findings investigate two types of mechanism, reflecting the openness of the data movement and the competitive commercial need for closure. First, inclusion mechanisms are social mechanisms of the open data ecosystem which seek to attract a broad range of potential collaborators through supporting entrepreneurs to innovate with open data. Second, exclusion mechanisms are deployed to filter collaborators, to identify those who are seen by platforms to be more likely to successfully exploit their data, or develop revenue sharing relationships. We reveal how these mechanisms are used at different stages of the innovation process, to initially attract a wide pool of collaborators, before seeking to reduce them to better target limited resources. Despite ‘openness’ being a key requirement of open data publication, for successful transformational entrepreneur exploitation, it requires dimensions of closure.