Open Data initiatives are increasingly considered as defining elements of emerging smart cities. However, few studies have attempted to provide a better understanding of the nature of this convergence and the impact on both domains. This paper presents findings from a detailed study of 18 open data initiatives across five smart cities -- Barcelona, Chicago, Manchester, Amsterdam, and Helsinki. Specifically, the study sought to understand how open data initiatives are shaped by the different smart cities contexts and concomitantly what kinds of innovations are enabled by open data in these cities. The findings highlight the specific impacts of open data innovation on the different smart cities domains, governance of the cities, and the nature of datasets available in the open data ecosystem.

Despite the increasing number of datasets available on open data platforms, there has been limited adoption and use of open data by the public. This has consequently limited the innovation and transparency impact of open data on respective economies and governments. While literature is replete with articles on barriers to open data exploitation and use; these studies are yet to examine how affordances of open data platforms could help to overcome these barriers. This perspective is important since the platform directly mediates access to open data resources and their use. We describe a study carried out as part the Route-To-PA (Route-To-PA Project, Raising Open and User-friendly Transparency Enhancing Technologies for Public Administrations, H2020 Project, http://​routetopa.​eu/​ .) project to establish stakeholder’s perspectives on barriers to effective use of open data and the desired open data platform affordances to address these problems. Our results provide details on what kinds of data are needed by stakeholders, the features required to support their interactions and collaboration around open data and features that could enhance the understandability of datasets available on open data platform.

Open data (OD) is increasingly considered as a core resource for many organizations in the emerging data economy. Open data-driven organizations (ODDOs) like any other organizations must develop capabilities for competitiveness and agility in addition to processes for creating value from OD to survive. While questions about the extent to which OD could be used for competitive advantage has been raised in past studies, no previous study has investigated the salient factors for agility in a dynamic data ecosystem. This paper bridges the knowledge gap by developing an operationalization of the Dynamic Capability Theory for ODDOs. As a first step towards determining the critical factors for developing dynamic capabilities (DCs) in these organizations, we analyzed the information gathered from an expert interview on the saliency of the different aspects and stages of dynamic capability in developing the agility of an up-stream organization or OD supplier in the data ecosystem. Our findings suggest that critical factors for DCs differ for organizations in the upstream and downstream sectors, albeit some core elements are shared across sectors in data ecosystem.