Turning an idea into business: innovation comes through open data

As the open data sector has developed in recent years, we have also seen an increase in its impact on the business and entrepreneurial world. In addition, the growing interest of many institutions (both public and private) in the entrepreneurial and technological world has made it possible to effect a transition in the support given to data entrepreneurs by these institutions, moving beyond contests and challenges to more complex frameworks with incubators and business accelerators. The aim is now to gather these initial ideas and develop them, providing them with the resources and visibility necessary to turn them into viable business projects, including, in many cases, direct investment in the project.

There are currently more than 250 incubators and accelerators in Spain alone, both public and private, including several that are well-known and well established in the country, such as SeedRocket, Wayra, Digital Assets Deployment, and Lanzadera. These programs offer, in their initial phases, basic support consisting of multiple services, such as physical space, financial, legal, and operational support, business plan development, evolution, growth and expansion, and personal mentoring for each of the projects. The objective is to accelerate projects that are either in their conceptual phase or already under development in order to progress more rapidly and generate profits when they come to market.

Given the proliferation of this type of services, progress is being made beyond a model that was, perhaps, too general towards one of greater specialisation, where, in addition to offering all the advanced services, there is also a focus on hosting and supporting projects in a specific sector of activity, with advisors with expertise in this area. This is exactly what can be seen happening in the data sector, where it is now possible to find acceleration projects that focus on the most significant challenges relating to data management, including security, technology, business intelligence, open data, data science, and big data. In this regard, there are well-known leading options in the United States, such as Data Elite, The Data Incubator, or StartX, but there are also others in Spain, which do operate on the international stage, such as Incubio and The Internet of Things & Data.

The European Commission, as part of its strategy and overall policy on open data, has no desire to miss the boat of new entrepreneurial developments regarding data and has, therefore, created its own acceleration programmes for businesses in the data economy, with two successful programmes to date:

Finodex: A virtual European accelerator that provided a broad range of services to entrepreneurs who offered their services and products using open data and the FIWARE platform in areas as varied as health, smart cities, transportation, agriculture, energy, teaching, and logistics. With nearly 500 ideas in total and more than 100 companies in 19 different countries that have been part of the acceleration programme, the results of the project have surpassed initial expectations, accruing a total ROI of more than 75% and procuring more than 10.5 million euros in additional funding for companies.

ODINE: This open data incubator provided a six-month incubation programme to European entrepreneurs by offering financing, further training, ongoing support, participation in exclusive events, and media promotion, as well as access to an international network of contacts and investors. In total, more than 1,000 proposals were received covering various disciplines from across Europe, from which more than 50 companies were selected to receive more than 5 million euros of total investment, generating a total economic impact of over 20 million euros. 

Thanks to the success of and precedent set by these programmes, we now have a new call in Data Pitch, a project intended to provide support to a total of 50 entrepreneurs who use the data provided by partner organisations to resolve social problems. Data Pitch will offer up to 100,000 euros of funding in two rounds of funding for each of the initiatives for which they provide guidance, starting in July.