The Strategic Management of Data Sharing and Openness Across Organizational Boundaries

Licentiate thesis, 2025

Data is increasingly recognized as a fundamental strategic asset, but its potential for both firms and society depends on how it can be used, shared, and combined across organizational boundaries. However, many organizations remain reluctant to share their data due to concerns regarding compliance, control, and ownership. This thesis addresses this dilemma by exploring how organizations can strategically design and manage data sharing and data openness to align with business models and regulatory frameworks, thereby enabling innovation and value creation.

The thesis builds on a conceptual review of data openness in the management and strategy literature, as well as a qualitative empirical case study comparing two digital platforms in the healthcare sector. Through these studies, data openness is found not to be binary in the sense of being either fully open or fully closed, as is commonly assumed, but rather multidimensional and designable through a set of identified dimensions that can be tailored to strategic purposes. By empirically investigating how data sharing is managed in practice, data sharing challenges, along with solutions implemented to address them, are identified. Such solutions are tightly connected to the business model of the platform. The thesis contributes to the understanding of how data sharing choices shape, and are shaped by, collaboration, innovation, and regulation.