eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

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Governments and private companies have begun to make vast amounts of data resources available to the public without usage restrictions, in the form of open data. For example, Finnish governmental bureaus have made legal documents, statistics, geographical data, traffic data, and environmental data freely available for public use. These new data sources have enabled innovative services in several areas, and create a lucrative opportunity for media companies. Open data can enrich media content, for example, with live data streams, advanced visualizations, and context and location dependent information.

This thesis identifies opportunities open data provides for media companies by conducting an extensive field study of the Finnish open data landscape. First, 15 companies pioneering in open data use are analysed to determine their offering, revenue model and resources, and the general value network in which they operate. These findings are then considered from the media company perspective in order to identify opportunities that open data provides for them.

The open data industry in Finland is still in its early stages, but some commercial success can already be identified. This study grouped the examined companies into five profiles in an open data value network: (1) data analysers, (2) data extractors and transformers, (3) user experience providers, (4) commercial data publishers, and (5) support services and consultancy. These five profiles are grounded on both; the empirical findings of this study as well as the theoretical frameworks established by preceding academic papers.

For media companies this research found three opportunity avenues; (1) use open data as a source in data journalism, (2) gather article ideas and content from the visual and numerical data analyses conducted by third-party analysers, or (3) achieve costs savings by publishing private data and using crowds to analyse it or creating user interfaces on top of it.