The Belgian open data ecosystem and innovation through open data

Many researches cover the challenges, barriers or benefits of open government. A disproportionately lower share of the literature concerns the socio-economic benefits of open data in general from an open data re-user perspective. Why should a company or an individual start re-using open data? Until now, only few metrics have been developed to measure the impacts of open data due to multiple reasons. Besides this, the concept of ecosystem has emerged for a couple of years to explain the connections and interactions between actors of the open data market. What is the current state of the Belgian open data ecosystem? How to support its development in the coming years? Concerning re-users, what are the factors enhancing innovation through open data? How could innovation through open data be improved in the right context? Those are the questions we contribute to answer in this study. Belgium is an interesting case due to its specific context and with an ecosystem being developed at the moment. Our methodology has focused on combining different approaches to obtain the largest view as possible. Therefore, we have started with a review of the literature, followed by a survey for Belgian re-users of open data before conducting interviews with Belgian open data experts with varied backgrounds and roles in the Belgian open data ecosystem. The main results from our research are first, an overview of the current Belgian open data ecosystem. We have built up a map, identified the categories of actors composing the ecosystem and what are the future trends of development. For each group of actors, we have established a profile with nevertheless a focus on the re-users. Second, we have observed different factors of innovation applying to open data re-uses and some benefits of open data in Belgium. Our main finding concerns the relation between open data ecosystem and innovation through open data: how the first could help the second if the current lack of interactions between actors is improved. Achieving this is a community responsibility in order to reach an ‘organised’ open data ecosystem. The main limit to our results is the relatively low number of answers to our survey as a consequence of the difficulty to identify re-users of open data. Nonetheless, our research could be useful obviously at a larger scale (e.g. European) to complete similar data collected and furthermore it could be useful as example for other countries and regions facing similar challenges.