Data-driven innovation is expected to be one of the most important technological advances in the recent years, with some estimates showing that it has the potential to create more than $300bn of economic value in the next decade. Productivity is a key driver of economic growth. Therefore, it is important to understand how the potential productivity gains from data-driven innovation can be realised. Though the potential of the data economy to improve productivity growth is significant, some two-thirds of potential value generation is seen to be at risk from failure to establish trusted flows of data.
The Digital Catapult is a national centre designed to rapidly advance 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.
The Digital Catapult can contribute to productivity growth across different sectors, disciplines and organisational types through three mechanisms of change aimed at overcoming inefficiencies:
By applying these mechanisms 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.
Stuart Parris
Anton Spisak
Louise Lepetit
Sonja Marjanovic
Salil Gunashekar
Molly Morgan Jones
In response to the release of our report, Digital Catapult chief commercial officer Andrew Carr wrote a blog post on Productivity growth from sharing closed data.
Digital Catapult also created an infographic, below, to summarise our research. Click on the image to go to the Digital Catapult site and view a larger version of the infographic.
