At the same time with data governance renaissance data is increasingly becoming an article of trade or commerce - in short, a product. The era of data is about the process of refining data or commoditization. At the same time data is becoming an independently valuable asset that is freely available and interchangeable on the market.
A “commodity” is defined as something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage. Some well-known examples of traditional commodities are grains, gold, beef, oil and natural gas. In brief, a commodity is a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other commodities of the same type and is often used as inputs in the production of other goods or services.
Open data is the strong manifestation of this new era. The government mandates and open data policies from multiple countries and public entities continue to contribute to the process of data commoditization. Openness has the benefit of increasing the size of the market. The greater the size of the market and the demand for a resource, the greater the competitive pressure on price and, hence, the increase in the commoditization of the resource.
Data as a Product was one step towards servitized data. Open data started the tsunami of data and after the hype data monetization and commercialization have raised the often discussed topics also in academic research. Yet the focus has been mostly in big data and technical aspects of the data. Emerging data economy markets are not fully yet here yet. Instead, we are still in the phase of learning to utilize and monetize data - both require data value streams that are expected to follow the service-driven paradigm more than the goods-dominant paradigm.
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