A note on financing

So how might this all be financed? Questions to address are whether and how intermediaries fund data users for their projects, data holders pay or invest into data users, or data users pay for access to the data. 

Decisions regarding this are affected by why the data is being shared. If it is for corporate social responsibility reasons, the cost may be appropriately financed from the sustainability budget, and asking users to pay for access may undercut the purpose of sharing. 

Shared data can be directly monetised, either through a marketplace such as Dawex (see case study on page 6), or by selling licences directly. This obviously means that while revenue is created up front, there is little opportunity to set the direction of, or share in the upside of, innovation with the data.

Another option is to invest in the data sharing and then benefit from the results, through mechanisms such as new products and services that become available, or increased efficiency of internal processes.

Lastly, participation in a programme such as Data Pitch does not completely remove costs, but certainly removes some of the direct costs of the development of the legal agreement, finding solution providers or supporting their work.