The Digital Catapult and productivity

The Digital Catapult is a national centre designed to advance rapidly the UK's best digital ideas and to help unlock new value from sharing closed and proprietary data. RAND Europe was commissioned by the Digital Catapult to conduct a study to develop a conceptual framework to understand the present and prospective contribution of the Digital Catapult's activities to the UK's economic productivity. We found that the Digital Catapult targets market and innovation inefficiencies that likely inhibit the rapid commercialisation and up-take of data innovation across firms and industries. If not addressed, these barriers may well hinder the benefits that sharing closed and proprietary data sets and open innovation could deliver to productivity growth in the UK. The Digital Catapult has three main mechanisms of change through which it can unlock these efficiency barriers for different sectors, disciplines and organisational types by: (i) enabling the development of core data infrastructure; (ii) increasing the absorptive capacity of organisations to derive the value from data, assimilate it and use it towards commercial ends; and (iii) convening expertise, providing leadership and fostering trust in key markets.