In today’s digital era, data have become a valuable resource for digital enterprise to innovate and stay competitive in the market. This also applies to developing countries, where start-ups offer new digital products and services and transform everyday lives. One way to realize data-driven innovations is by sharing data among parties and even competitors to generate new insights and improve the quality of products or services.
In this context, data marketplaces are emerging, which are described as platforms that bring multiple parties together to exchange data with each other. Data marketplaces could play a key role in enabling data-driven innovations for digital enterprises in developing countries since they face a significantly different challenges in terms of resources and capabilities than digital enterprises in developed countries. More importantly, data marketplaces might generate value for digital enterprises in developing countries, because new insights can be generated by analyzing data from multiple sources.
Various initiatives and pilots on data marketplaces are available (e.g. OpenDataSoft, Azure Data Market, Data Market Austria). However, they often struggle and fail to survive. This is mainly due to lack of trust, fear of losing competitive advantage when sharing data, or the risk of violating strict privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR). To tackle these challenges, in the Safe-DEED project (Safe Data-Enabled Economic Development) we focus on developing new privacy-preserving technologies to enable firms to expose data via data marketplaces without giving access to actual data. We are also conducting multi-actor business model research in order to bring those technologies to the market in a sustainable way so that digital enterprises can generate value from such a platform.
How is this relevant to the digital economy and development? There are several possible use cases within the digital economy and development context. For instance, SMEs could benefit from accessing data and information provided by other SMEs in data marketplaces to support market research, so that they can formulate a better strategy to reach their target market. Digital enterprises providing on-demand transportation services could also expose their data via data marketplaces, and support the government in developing traffic policies without revealing sensitive information. Furthermore, a peer-to-peer lending platform focusing on providing loans in rural areas can also expose data to conventional banks via data marketplaces to get a better picture of unbanked population in a country so that they can collaborate in achieving financial inclusion.
Of course, there are several challenges in realizing data marketplaces that are safe and secure, such as convincing the first couple of firms to join the data marketplace platform, the impact of such an innovation on trust, ethics, security, and finding a sustainable business model for the data marketplace itself. Hopefully, answers to these challenges will be available by the end of this project.
More information:
- Safe-DEED website: https://safe-deed.eu
- Finding a Business Model for Decentralized Data Marketplaces: https://safe-deed.eu/finding-a-business-model-for-decentralized-data-marketplaces
- Safe and secure data marketplaces for innovation: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/tpm/research/projects/safe-and-secure-data-marketplaces-for-innovation
Development Implications of Digital Economies (DIODE) Strategic Research Network 