Special issue on "Designing Data Ecosystems: Foundations, configurations and value"
Guest Editors
Theme
As data becomes more available in all areas of society and industry, organizations increasingly share data beyond their boundaries with external parties. Data ecosystems are among the most promising concepts that facilitate data sharing between data providers and consumers to create value for individual actors but also for larger collaborations (Oliveira et al. 2019; Oliveira and Lóscio 2018). The transformation towards data ecosystems is evident across domains and in novel use cases benefiting from using more data ranging from personalized medicine to industrial manufacturing.
Promoting this type of data-driven innovation has led to political and legislative initiatives in many parts of the world that seek to make data usable beyond the internal boundaries of an organization: For example, the European Commission formulated the European Data Strategy that aims to generate a European data ecosystem that acts as a single market for free-flowing data (European Commission 2023). The goal is to leverage previously unused data and, for instance, share industrial data between companies to enable new business models and increase organizational efficiency (European Commission 2020). In Europe, the Data Act (DA) and Data Governance Act (DGA) mandate how data is shared by using so-called "data intermediation services" that act as neutral intermediaries between data providers and data consumers. In Asia, Singapore has published a "Trusted Data Sharing Framework" to help companies overcome challenges in addressing digital trust between data providers and develop "trusted data".
The emerging phenomena related to data sharing and data ecosystems have attracted great attention in Information Systems (IS) research. Initial studies conceptualize data ecosystems proposing roles (e.g., Oliveira et al. 2019; Oliveira and Lóscio 2018), explore research streams (e.g., Fassnacht et al. 2023), investigate how data ecosystems emerge (e.g., Gelhaar and Otto 2020) or how they are organized and governed (e.g., Lefebvre et al. 2023). Data ecosystems rely on technological infrastructure around which they evolve as inter-organizational socio-technical systems with specific governance and institutional arrangements (e.g., van den Broek and van Veenstra 2015). Examples are data marketplaces, data trusts, or data spaces. This results in promising opportunities for IS research to explore data ecosystems as a novel phenomenon enabling data-driven innovation on multiple levels. For example, while data ecosystem operationalization has a technological component, organizations also require sound institutional setups and business models to take part in them and leverage them fully. In this context, companies must master the tensions in participating in data ecosystems (e.g., weighing whether or not to share data depending on the potential value that can be generated from it, Jussen et al. 2023). This is only one example of potentially many decisions organizations, and individuals face when engaging with data ecosystems.
Central issues and topics
This call for papers extends on the special issue on "Data economy in a globalized world: Opportunities and challenges for public and private organizations" (de Reuver et al. 2022) and welcomes papers that explore various facets of data ecosystems. It intends to advance our understanding of this emerging phenomenon and invites a broad range of research approaches, including empirical work, case studies, and design-oriented research. Topics relevant to the special issue/topical collection include, but are not limited to:
Accepted Papers (to be extended):
Full collection available at: https://link.springer.com/collections/decggfiedh