innovación

As every year, it is time to evaluate the activity carried out during the last year.

2018 has been a very positive year for Aporta initiative. On the one hand, our work has been acknowledged, one more year, by the European Data Portal, which consider our country as an open data trend-setter. In addition, published datasets has grown, exceeding the barrier of 21,500 (32% more than the previous year), as well as publishers and user visits (with a growth of 15% and 64%, respectively).

On this year, we have focused on the promotion of reuse companies, highlighting the role of open data as a driver of innovation and entrepreneurship. The new edition of the Aporta Meeting, held on November 28, addressed this topic. During the event, public bodies, start-ups and big companies analyzed the keys to success and the challenges of entrepreneurship linked to data and new technological paradigms. It was also discussed how the opening and reuse of data improve the management of public administrations. The event was a great success of the public and had a notable impact on the media.

In addition, we have continued with our work of dissemination and promotion of open data, reporting both news at national and international level, as well as generating guides and articles that help to launch a greater number of initiatives, promoting openness of information from public administrations. It should be noted that an increasing number of agencies use our advice and support service to solve technical and methodological doubts. In addition, we have reinforced the interview section, giving voice to professionals who have initiated interesting projects.

All the successes achieved have been possible thanks to the open data community, whose effort has driven the achievement of all the objectives. We will continue working in 2019 to further boost the universe of open data in Spain.

8th Edition of Aporta Meeting will take place on November 28. In this occasion, the event will focus on the power of public data to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. Under the motto "Innovation with public data", consolidated companies, start-ups and public bodies will share their experience about taking advantage of improvement and business opportunities linked to open data and new technological paradigms, such as Big Data or Artificial intelligence.

Thanks to these testimonies, attendees can learn first-hand about the challenges of an innovative project with open data, and discover possible solutions. The objective is to create an inclusive and dynamic event, where attendees can also share their concerns and own experiences through collaborative round tables.

The Meeting will begin at 9:30 in the Assembly Hall of the Secretariat of State for Digital Progress (Ministry of Economy and Enterprise).

• Round table 1: The value of open data reuse for Public Administrations

The first round table will be focused on public administrations and how the reuse of their data allows optimizing the services offered to citizens.

There are many examples of local, regional or state entities that have implemented services and applications based on public data to improve their agility and efficiency. These services allow a more direct communication, promoting transparency and accountability, as well as a greater participation of citizens in their locality or region political life. In addition, through the data analysis, these organizations can also identify behavior patterns that drive better resource planning and greater services personalization.

In order to address this issue, representatives from the following entities will participate in the round table: City of Madrid - who will moderate the debate-, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Junta of Castilla y León, Autonomous Community of Murcia, Renfe and Provincial Council of Bizkaia.

• Round table II: Public sector information and entrepreneurship

According to the latest data from the National Observatory of Telecommunications and the Information Society (ONTSI), currently, there are more than 530 small and medium-sized companies with the objective of creating ideas and new products based on public information and data. These companies generated a turnover of 1,500 - 1,750 million euros and more than 5,000 direct jobs in 2016.

Innovation based on public data is especially noticeable when we talk about entrepreneurs and start-ups. The availability of free public data or public data with a marginal cost reduce the risk of starting a new business.

Therefore, the second round table will be integrated by entrepreneurs and startups from different sectors that are developing new products and services based on public data reuse and analysis. This is the case of VisualNACert, a software developer that improves the management of agricultural farms, Piperlab, which uses Big Data technologies and data sciences to develop algorithms that improve decision making, or Naru Intelligence, which applies data analytics to biomedicine sector. This round table will be moderated by Barcelona Open Data Initiative.

• Round table III: Public data and business development

But open data is not only useful for entrepreneurs. An increasing number of private entities use public data to face business challenges and improve their competitiveness. For these companies, public data has become an additional business resource that contributes to maintaining leadership in their industry sector, reducing corporate costs, adapting to and evolving with agility in their environments and collaborating with clients - and even competitors- to face industry challenges.

Therefore, the third round table will be integrated by four international companies that will explain how public data use help improve their products or services, adapt to new markets and expand their radius of influence in the industry. These companies are Informa, Syngenta, GMV and Esri, who will share their experience under the moderation of the Secretariat of State for Digital Progress.

The complete agenda is available in this link. Although the event is free, places are limited. Therefore, those interested in attending must register in this link.

Open data has direct benefits in the economy, as it contributes to improve income, create jobs and save costs. Thanks to open data, companies can not only acquire a greater knowledge about their environment and make better decisions, but also use open data as raw material for their business development.

According to the Economic benefits of Open Data, a report carried out by the European Data Portal, the direct market size of open data will increase by 36% between 2016 and 2020 in the European Union, reaching a cumulative direct market size of 325 billion euros. The same report highlights that more than 25,000 jobs will be created in the private sector, at the same period.

Although innovation around open data takes place in organizations of all sizes and maturity levels, its value is especially notable when we talk about entrepreneurs and start-ups. Open data decreases the risk of starting a new business, since many data are free or have a marginal cost. Therefore, an increasing number of companies are starting their professional journey using public data to create new business models, products and services: according to the latest ASEDIE report, 23% of Spanish reuser companies have been founded in the last 5 years.

Although the outlook is positive, it is true that companies that want to undertake using open data also have to face a series of organizational, technical and financial challenges. Building a business case can be slow, especially if you don´t have all the economic resources and the necessary technical skills. Here, public administrations can play an important role.

According to the Open Data and Entrepreneurship report, public administrations can help drive innovation and entrepreneurship based on open data through 5 principles:

• Build the ecosystem including technical experts with business knowledge, citizens, journalists and data providers. The objective is to create a space for dialogue where player´s needs can be addressed, driving collaboration and the creation of new financing mechanisms and income streams.
• Promote that young people use open data through education. On the one hand, encouraging academic plans to increase the offer in terms of data analysis and disruptive technologies. On the other hand, promoting educational projects, contests or events that communicate the value of open data, encourage its reuse and promote the acquisition of new skills. As an example, Barcelona Dades obertes and the Escuelas Comciencia.
• Invest in national and regional acceleration and incubation programs. A good idea is to advise and support entrepreneurs through virtual accelerators, grants, mentoring programs and other actions aimed at promoting innovation. All actions should be linked with the community we have created, fostering the replication of successful strategies.
• Make the link between entrepreneurs, data and domain. Organizing hackathons or challenges on themed lines to engage with the domain, drive certain data sets and help companies focused on this area.
• Monitor entrepreneurs’ activities. Knowing which data sets are the most reused and their purpose allows to measure open data impact and promote the opening of new data sets.

In short, the role of public administrations does not end with the publication of open data, but its contribution is essential to promote a data-based economy, driving the reuse of information and the creation of new business models and work positions.

Increasing the flow of open data is one of the major recommendations to accelerate digitalisation in Spain, as outlined in the report ‘Digital reinvention: an opportunity for Spain’, prepared by Fundación Cotec para la Innovación and Digital McKinsey. According to this report, published last July, digitalisation could mean lead to an increase in Spain’s GDP of between 1.8% and 2.3% per year until 2025. Today, the digital economy represents 5.6% of Spain's GDP.

The document highlights how the process of digitalisation is accelerating and transforming society as a whole and how we are currently presented with new innovations, including the Internet of Things, Big Data, and advanced analytics, as well as the impact that digital transformation has on all economic and social spheres, surveying the various waves of innovation and how they have shaped the digital economy. In particular, it refers to the companies that are leading this transformation and how many milestones have already been reached in the process of digitalisation in Spain.

Over 60 pages, the report describes how digitalisation functions as a lever to improve productivity and that this transition to the digital world requires a reconfiguration of the productive model. The better use of data to develop new products is, indeed, one of the keys to this process.

The report sets out a dozen proposals (chart attached) – one of them is the increase in open data mentioned above – to speed up digitalisation in Spain in the short term and notes that a joint effort between public institutions, the private sector, and citizens is a major precondition.

In particular, it specifies that prioritising the measurement and publication of national data is required in order to accelerate digitalisation, along with increased connectivity with other EU countries by means of the free flow of data. ‘Data sharing increases understanding between sectors and institutions and provides a basis for decision-making and creating applications that leverage Big Data.’ The report states that ‘Although Spain is the European leader in Open Data, more can still be done by participating in the various initiatives to integrate European data infrastructure.’ In this sense, the report supports the Open Science Cloud, created to connect researchers from all over Europe, allowing them to store and share data between countries, and recommends doing everything possible to encourage initiatives of this nature, as well as continuing to work on the integration and publication of national data.

This report provides examples of how governments around the world are joining the trend of making their data public. For example, several cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Chongqing, have launched pages that allow citizens to freely access government data. More than 400 databases published by the city of Beijing provide information about tourism, education, transport, land use, and medical treatment. Companies are using this data to create applications that facilitate urban mobility and even help prevent disease.

Another of the examples of open data is that of Boston About Results, a performance measurement platform launched in 2006 in the city of Boston (USA) that publishes performance data from various departments and projects. ‘By publishing the data, it increases the accountability of public officials, advances the public administration's transparency, and strengthens management by providing officials with tools,’ it states.

The study advocates the use of digital technologies to improve R&D. ‘The availability of large amounts of data and the ability to analyse it would not only help to improve the speed at which new discoveries are generated but would also decrease the development time of new products through improved testing and quality measurement mechanisms. It concludes that ‘Computer-aided design and the data generated from production systems can help engineers to design the next generation of products’. Indeed, one of the main conclusions referring to the data in this report, ‘Digital reinvention: an opportunity for Spain’, is that the digitalisation of the economy favours the availability, tracking, and processing of data, which consequently allows an improvement in productivity.

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.