Barriers to innovating with open government data: Exploring experiences across service phases and user types

Journal article, 2018

Open government data (OGD) can enable outbound open innovation (OI) that is beneficial to society. However, innovation barriers hinder OGD users from generating value. While previous studies have detailed a large number of such barriers, little is known of how different types of OGD users are affected, and when the barriers appear in their innovation processes. To this end, this paper describes a case study of distributed service development in the Swedish public transport sector. The contribution to extant research is twofold. Firstly, based on an inductive analysis, three OGD user archetypes are proposed: employees, entrepreneurs and hobbyists. Secondly, the study finds that the significance of distinct innovation barriers varies across phases of the services’ lifecycles and depending on the OGD users’ motivation, objective, pre-conditions and approach. Drawing on these insights, we propose that OGD initiatives aimed at facilitating outbound OI to a greater extent should address the barriers that appear during diffusion of innovations, the barriers that are not directly related to the OGD provision, and the barriers that are experienced by non-obvious OGD user groups.