Open Data Diffusion for Service Innovation: An Inductive Case Study on Cultural Open Data Services

Information Systems research on Open Data has been primarily focused on its contribution to e-government inquiries, government transparency, and open government. Recently, Open Data has been explored as a catalyser for service innovation as a consequence of big claims around the potential of such initiatives in terms of additional value that can be injected into the worldwide economy. Subsequently, the Open Data Services academic conversation was structured (Lindman et al. 2013a). The research project presented in this paper is an interpretive case study that was carried out to explore the factors that influence the diffusion of Open Data for new service development. This paper contributes to this debate by providing an interpretive inductive case study (Walsham 1995) of a tourism company that successfully turned several city authorities’ raw open datasets into a set of valuable services. Results demonstrate that 16 factors and 68 related variables are the most relevant in the process of diffusion of open data for new service development. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the suitability of Social Constructionism and interpretive case study research to inductively generate knowledge in this field