Open data services have emerged as a research field. One important area of investigation within this field is exploration into how sustainable open data markets are created. Contests have become a popular method to propel and catalyse open data service development providing services to such markets. Recent research has identified numerous innovation barriers hampering development adjacent to the contest in developers’ effort to transform contest contributions to viable digital services based on open data. Little is however known about what innovation barriers over time constrain the post-contest process to transform initial innovations to finalized open data services ready for market entry. This paper presents a longitudinal survey of innovation barriers constraining teams performing open data service development after an innovation contest. The survey provides insights into 1) 24 innovation barriers constraining development, 2) a comparison of barrier importance based on team progress, and 3) a conceptualisation of phases structuring the process from contests to market entry, stipulating different innovation barriers impact open data service development. The results contribute to the understanding of how sustainable open data markets emerge and serve as a starting point for investigating how different stakeholders can manage innovation barriers constraining open data service development.

There is an ongoing movement in society to provide open data as an enabler for innovation and growth. As more data is passed on beyond organizational borders to trigger third party development of services, the expectations on what could be developed using open data increase. Developers have been observed to express frustration over different challenges in the wake of open data provision, such as localization issues, lack of quality in data etc. Knowledge and tools are missing to assess available open data. This absence risks ensuring continual improvement of open data markets and the management of hampering gaps between developers’ requests of data and data providers’ provision of data. This paper explores the benefits with open data assessment based on an exploratory single case research design. 

Innovation contests are becoming popular instruments for stimulating development of digital services using open data. However, experience indicates that only a limited number of the results developed during these events become viable digital services attracting a significant user base. To further deepen our understanding of the role, design and function of innovation contests in open data markets, we conducted a survey of the websites of 33 digital innovation contests. The results of the survey show that organizers design digital innovation contests to function as intermediaries for open data innovation. By analyzing the activities performed by organizers we found several examples of how innovation contests support the participants in designing, implementing and providing services after the contests are concluded. We contribute with a key design element and attributes for the post-contest process of digital innovation contests, which adds to existing key design elements. For future research we suggest to further study open data markets and the intermediary role of digital innovation contests. Moreover we propose to develop guidelines and tools for organizers of digital innovation contests to design contests that better meet the needs of a particular open data market.

Governments aim to increase democracy by engaging the public in using open data to develop mobile apps and citizen services. They make information available (open data) and organize innovation contests to stimulate innovation with the goal to make new services available for the public to use. But will the public take on the challenge to both develop and provide services to each other? In this paper we use a case study from public transportation to investigate the motivation for individuals and teams to participate in innovation contests. The results show that the motivation for participating is primarily related to fun and enjoyment. We argue that in order to better meet the goals of open data innovation, governments need to follow through the full service innovation cycle and also care for making citizen coproduction in the execution and monitoring phases fun and enjoyable. Currently there is little chance for participants to make profit on a competitive market so governments need to provide other mechanisms to ensure service provisioning. For future research it is suggested to investigate how the later stages of open data innovation can be supported in order to meet the overall goals of open data innovation.

Information systems as an artefact-oriented discipline require a strong interaction between researchers, developers and users regarding design of, development of, and the study of the use of digital artefacts in social settings. During recent years, performing research in a design science research spirit has gained increasing interest. In larger scale design research endeavours, access to systems development capabilities becomes necessary. Such a unit, InnovationLab, was established in 2006 in a university setting in Sweden. In this paper we are investigating the 5 years’ experience of running this InnovationLab. Our findings point to an innovation lab being valuable for research in general and especially for design science research. However, in order to balance the business of an innovation lab, it will be necessary to provide services for other stakeholders (such as administrative units, teachers, and students) as a means for developing systems development capability aimed at supporting researchers.

To draw on the innovation capabilities of third-party developers many organizations are currently deploying open application programming interfaces (API’s). While third-party services may offer commercial opportunities for independent software firms, a large portion of existing third-party software are undertaken without any financial compensation. Although unpaid developers offers a potential source for innovation of end-user services, the current literature has largely overlooked how these unpaid actors use and appropriate the technology provided by organizations. To this end, this research pays specific attention to the specific practices of unpaid developers. The data used for analysis were collected through a programming contest – a hackathon – where unpaid developers gather to craft end-user services. Through an ethnographic lens we present a number of recurrent activities and patterns of action employed by developers and from this analysis we present implications for API designers seeking to attract unpaid developers.

Activities and initiatives of co-creation are traditionally seen as a way for organizations to gain value through the involvement of certain actors in their environment. We notice an implicit assumption in current theoretical conceptualizations that co-creation is initiated and driven exclusively by organizations. However, it appears that co-creation activities may also be driven by third-party actors outside organizations. Based on interviews and secondary data from a public transport company in Stockholm, Sweden, we noticed that third party developers of services, that gained a large and diverse user base, were driving co-creation activities with the respective organization. Subsequently, based on our findings, we introduce the term "crowdpushing" to denote externally driven co-creation activities and frame four propositions to describe how co-creation activities are motivated and driven. Our findings contribute to a broader understanding of co-creation and have implications for its design and deployment.

In recent years, the phenomena of open data have lent a promise to expand the innovation network of an organization. By allowing this type of access to organizational resources, developers beyond the organizational realm may hence generate new innovative artifacts surpassing existing capabilities. However, as an organization utilizes these innovation capabilities they simultaneously loose significant control over the innovations’ alignment with existing organizational goals. One way to nurture and harness this type of innovation is to arrange a contest where third party developers are invited to attend. Using a Design Science Research approach, such a contest - a type of artifact we coin Digital Innovation Contest - was designed and field-tested in 2011. The contest, WestCoast TravelHack 2011, summoned 76 developers distributed on 20 teams and was based on an idea to both generate novel digital service prototypes and having these applications promote the organizational goal of less energy-consuming ways of everyday travel. We conclude that by following our empirically grounded and theoretically informed guidelines, this type of contest can indeed increase the likelihood of both producing innovative artifacts and aligning these innovations with organizational goals.