Public bodies, citizen groups, and industry around the world are embracing the open data movement. They have published a large share of their data assets in freely accessible forms. This open data is fuel for the digital age, powering insights, and boosting the speed and flexibility of business. We will see a global supply-and-value chain ecosystem emerging around data, delivering not just higher volumes of the same, but, crucially, new and improved products and services.
ODINE's main objective is to establish an EU-wide, industry-focused network of open data start-ups and SMEs around Europe through an incubation model. The incubation model includes support in terms of financial, data, and computing resources, but also not distracting them too much from building and growing their company during incubation, and offering the credible possibility of acceleration via the consortium in due time. In particular, ODINE will support the formation process of innovative open data-driven services and business ideas and help turning them into focused commercial and social enterprises; run regularly scheduled and well-advertised competitions for SMEs to submit mini-project proposals; provide seed funding and mentoring for the most promising ideas to be funded for a period of six months; assist the implementation and deployment of these ideas from the technological (help with infrastructure, data processing, toolkits, etc) and business development point of view (PR, marketing, sales planning, etc); and create a process to connect successful ODINE graduates with alternative sources of funding and business networks.
ODINE concluded its life cycle after receiving 1173 applications from 707 different companies from 34 countries, granting 56 SMEs an amount of € 5.422.799,64 in total, that generated €22.5M generated through investment (grants, BAs and VCs achieved during acceleration period ), sales, and efficiencies, in addition to 268 jobs created. ODINE also contributed with a toolkit for helping companies and organisations to release Open Data in a legal-compliant and privacy-respectful manner.
ODINE's impact was independently assessed in a report by the IDC consultancy firm, reaching to the following conclusions:
1) There is a high demand for Open Data, as it offers an Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
2) Based on IDC's forecast impact model, each euro invested by the EC in the ODINE project will have generated up to 14 euros in cumulative revenues by 2020. Counterfactual analysis indicates that without ODINE there would be 48% less cumulative revenues generated in 2020
3) The influence of ODINE’s mentors in helping several companies in redirecting and improving their business idea or business plan is clear.
4) There is a correlation between the level of maturity at country level of the Open Data market (measured by a Capgemini study) and the number of ODINE successful applicants, suggesting that proactive policies improving the usability and availability of open data sets are likely to stimulate private initiatives for the exploitation of data in a positive virtuous cycle.
Finally, lessons learned on ODINE were integrated into the processes of the ODI, University of Southampton and Telefonica Open Future own acceleration programs, and served as basis for subsequent programs focusing on exploiting shared data in addition to Open Data.
