Eight business models for government open data

Alex Howard has written an excellent article over at the O'Reilly Radar listing eight business models for government open data, a handy list for those in government agencies attempting to justify to senior management or Ministers why releasing government data is important and valuable.

The models listed in Alex's article, Open data economy: Eight business models for open data and insight from Deloitte UK, were identified by Michele Osella, a researcher and business analyst in the Business Model & Policy Innovation Unit at the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella in Italy.

(Note that these are classified in Europe as Public Sector Information (PSI) reuse cases.)

I've included the list of eight business models below and embedded Osella's presentation on the topic as a reference - it provides more detail and case studies on each.

From the article:

1. Premium Product / Service. HospitalRegisters.com
2. Freemium Product / Service. None of the 13 enterprises interviewed by us falls into this case, but a slew of instances may be provided: a classic example in this vein is represented by mobile apps related to public transportation in urban areas.
3. Open Source. OpenCorporates and OpenPolis
4. Infrastructural Razor Blades. Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Service
5. Demand-Orientated Platform. DataMarket and Infochimps
6. Supply-Oriented Platform. Socrata and Microsoft Open Government Data Initiative
7. Free, as Branded Advertising. IBM City Forward, IBM Many Eyes or Google Public Data Explorer
8. White-Label Development. This business model has not consolidated yet, but some embryonic attempts seem to be particularly promising.