Potential prize from Open Data could be enormous: $3-5 trillion a year globally

Jul 22, 2014

The economic potential of Open Data is summarised and reviewed in a new World Bank paper, and it concludes that, despite a variation in published estimates and some methodological difficulties, the potential is very large.

"There’s a range of studies that suggest that the potential prize from Open Data could be enormous - including an estimate of $3-5 trillion a year globally from McKinsey Global Institute and an estimate of $13 trillion cumulative over the next 5 years in the G20 countries."

"There are supporting studies of the value of Open Data to certain sectors in certain countries - for instance $20 billion a year to Agriculture in the US - and of the value of key datasets such as geospatial data. All these support the conclusion that the economic potential is at least significant - although with a range from “significant” to “extremely significant”!"

Five main business archetypes have been identified: suppliers, aggregators, enrichers, application developers and enablers. If countries want to maximise their gain from Open Data the role of government needs to go beyond simply publishing some data and governments need to be:"

Suppliers - of the data that business need.

Leaders - making sure that municipalities, state owned enterprises and public services operated by the private sector also release important data.

Catalysts - nurturing a thriving ecosystem of data users, coders and application developers and incubating new, data-driven businesses.

Users - using Open Data themselves to overcome the barriers to using data within government and innovating new ways to use the data they collect to improve public services and government efficiency.

Read more at: Open Data for economic growth: the latest evidence.
Read the paper: Open Data for Economic Growth