Completed Economics & Business Education & Skills

The open data institute

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Open Data Institute Source-published name: Open Data Institute
Funding £10.1M
Period May 2012 — Jun 2017

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The UK is launching the world’s first Open Data Institute (ODI) in Shoreditch, East London, to turn government data into commercial and social value. This matters because the UK already leads in publishing open data—information anyone can access and reuse—but has no central hub to help businesses, public services, and researchers actually use it. Without the ODI, the potential economic and social benefits of open data risk remaining unrealised. The institute will tackle the practical challenges of publishing data, from technical standards to legal barriers, and train a generation of entrepreneurs to build products and services from it. If successful, the ODI could transform how public data flows into the economy. Businesses might create new apps, logistics tools, or energy-efficiency services from government datasets. Public sector bodies could use their own data more effectively to improve services. The institute will also benchmark open data initiatives globally, helping the UK maintain its lead. By building supply chains and commercial outlets for public data, the ODI aims to make open data a routine part of how the country innovates—not just a policy aspiration.

View original technical description
The vision is to establish the Open Data Institute (ODI) as a world-leading centre to innovate, exploit and research the opportunities for the UK created by the Government’s Open Data policy. The ODI is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and as such will become the ‘go to’ venue for those countries, companies, institutions and other bodies seeking to understand Open Data (OD), overcome the challenges of publishing OD, make commercial gain from OD and employ the best technologies to ensure OD is exploited in the best possible way. The aim is to build on the enviable position the UK already holds in the publishing of data and to ensure that over the coming years that position is consolidated and strengthened. The ODI will be based in Shoreditch, East London and will demonstrate the commercial value of Open Government Data and the impact of OD policies on the realisation of this value. It will also develop the capability of UK businesses to exploit this value, with support from University researchers. It will help the public sector use its own data more effectively and engage with developers, the private and public sector to build supply chains and commercial outlets for public data. It will foster and train a generation of OD entrepreneurs. It will help secure and commission research in underpinning OD technologies and serve to benchmark OD initiatives not only in the UK but around the world

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Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Open Data INcubator for Europe
The National Innovation Centre for Data
Data Release - Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security
UK Data Service
OCDP - Open City Data Platform

Original classification

Collaborative R&D

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.