Cocreating value from open data: From incentivizing developers to inducing cocreation in open data innovation ecosystems

Open governmental data available via platforms like data.gov have earned a place in the innovation agenda of governments and local authorities alike. To success fully make use of these sources, governments around the world experiment with competitive virtual contests or challenges to ignite the creativity of developers and hackers and motivate them to turn this data into novel digital applications. However, such efforts don't seem to be sustainable. Applications developed in such contests regularly fail to ignite the continuous use by the end users. We argue that governments need to adopt an ecosystem perspective facilitating cocreation within the diverse open data innovation ecosystems of developers, producers, and users in order to foster the generativity needed for continuous value creation. However, various tensions among actors appear along the way. Taking a paradoxi cal view towards ecosystem tensions, we propose a socio-technical infrastructure that supports ecosystem generativity by addressing latent tensions in the "breed ing zone" of an open data innovation. The infrastructure supports generative responses to these tensions in three ways: Creating virtual trading zones, sup porting the duality of stable and dynamic roles, and providing technological af- fordances for fluidity. This framework could set the stage for future research, encouraging system designers and policymakers to foster cocreation in open data innovation ecosystems.