Data platforms enable actors to exchange personal and business data. While data is relevant for any digital platform, data platforms exclusively revolve around data artifacts. This paper argues that the specific characteristics of data artifacts challenge the authors’ understanding of platform openness. Specifically, it is argued that data artifacts are editable, interactive and distributable, which means that the consequences of opening up a data platform extend far beyond the focal platform and its context. From this, the study infers that the scope of platform openness extends beyond the data platform on which data artifacts originate. At the same time, the very nature of data artifacts afford new mechanisms to realize and reduce the risks of openness. New avenues are suggested to study platform openness in the realm of data platforms. These avenues include (1) exploring and incorporating novel consequences of platform openness in a data platform setting, (2) examining new arenas for defining openness beyond a focal platform’s confines, and (3) theorizing the implications of new mechanisms for realizing openness while maintaining apparent control over data artifacts.

In the data economy, data sovereignty is often conceptualized as data providers’ ability to control their shared data. While control is essential, the current literature overlooks how this facet interrelates with other sovereignty facets and contextual conditions. Drawing from social contract theory and insights from 31 expert interviews, we propose a data sovereignty conceptual framework encompassing protection, participation, and provision facets. The protection facets establish data sharing foundations by emphasizing baseline rights, such as data ownership. Building on this foundation, the participation facet, through responsibility divisions, steers the provision facets. Provision comprises facets such as control, security, and compliance mechanisms, thus ensuring that foundational rights are preserved during and after data sharing. Contextual conditions (data type, organizational size, and business data sharing setting) determine the level of difficulty in realizing sovereignty facets. For instance, if personal data is shared, privacy becomes a relevant protection facet, leading to challenges of ownership between data providers and data subjects, compliance demands, and control enforcement. Our novel conceptualization paves the way for coherent and comprehensive theory development concerning data sovereignty as a complex, multi-faceted construct.

Managers increasingly seek ways to explore insights from data for business improvements and innovation. Data Analytics (DA) platforms hold promise for businesses, especially small businesses that cannot afford tailor-made proprietary analytics services. DA platforms offer generic analytics features to a pool of businesses, saving costs and enabling benchmarking. This paper explores value propositions and adoption challenges for small businesses regarding DA. The paper offers practical insights from designing and launching a DA platform targeting small businesses in the hospitality sector. The findings of our paper show that data analytics is potentially valuable for small businesses through insights into market and customer trends. Small businesses can leverage such insights to refine their offerings. Trust and privacy concerns in sharing data are key challenges holding back adoption. We proposed measures, especially privacy-preserving technologies, to mitigate the risk of tracing a specific enterprise's data shared on the DA platform. These measures assure businesses that data shared or analysed through the DA platform is not used to harm their competitive advantage.

Investigating meta-platforms has been a continuing concern within information system literature due to the increasingly complex constellations of platforms in ecologies of ecosystems. A meta-platform is a platform built on top of two or more platforms, hence connecting their respective ecosystems. One promising case to benefit from meta-platforms is data marketplaces: a particular type of platform that facilitates responsible (personal and non-personal) data sharing among companies. Given that business models for meta-platforms are largely unexplored in this emerging case, how they can create value for data marketplaces remain speculative. As a starting point toward business model investigations, this paper explores value creation of a meta-platform in the case of data marketplaces. We interviewed fourteen data-sharing consultants and six meta-platform experts. We identify three potential value creation archetypes of a meta-platform. The discovery aggregator archetype emphasizes searching and dispatching value, while the brokerage one focuses on promoting and supporting value. Finally, the one-stop-shop archetype creates value by standardizing, regulating, sharing, and experimenting. This study is among the first that explore value creation archetypes for a meta-platform, thus identifying core value as a base for further business model investigations.

The landscape of platform ecosystems is becoming increasingly complex, with new types of platforms emerging that glue together otherwise fragmented ecosystems. One recent case is metaplatforms that can contribute to the European Data Economy by interconnecting data marketplaces; however, meta-platforms may intensify data sovereignty concerns: the inability of data providers to own and control the exchanged data. While smart contracts and certification can generally enhance data sovereignty, it is unknown whether data providers perceive these control mechanisms as valuable in the complex meta-platform setting. This study aims to evaluate the perceived efficacy of the control mechanisms to ensure data sovereignty in meta-platforms. The findings from a survey study (n=93) indicate that respondents perceive high data sovereignty. One potential explanation is that smart contracts can potentially enable providers to maintain ownership and control over their exchanged data; meanwhile, certification may signal metaplatforms’ responsibility to deliver secure data exchange infrastructure and assist providers in adhering to relevant regulations. This study contributes to advancing design knowledge for meta-platforms, showcasing that meta-platforms can be designed in a way to resolve fragmentation without neglecting data sovereignty principles.

Digital ecosystem governance entails the management of complex, dynamic power relationships. As entrant platform providers seek to cultivate an ecosystem, they must carefully navigate these power relationships when dealing with governance tensions. Providers generally seek to leverage the ecosystem's generative potential by facilitating a variety of interactions and distributing design rights. Simultaneously, they need to ensure stability and order by imposing rules that resolve contentious matters and restrict ecosystem participants' degrees of freedom. This study explores how and why providers can induce ecosystem actors to engage in collaborative negotiation regarding such governance tensions through a case study of the introduction of an open data platform in the Swedish public transport sector. Our analysis offers three main contributions. First, it provides an empirical demonstration that entrepreneurial threats, as well as opportunities, can trigger platform launches and drive collaborative negotiation of digital ecosystem governance. Second, it extends conceptualizations of boundary resources beyond the current focus on transactional elements by demonstrating the role of interactive boundary resources in the negotiation of governance grounded in both social and systemic power relationships. Third, it shows how positive reinforcement can complement punitive measures to increase acceptance of design rules.

Meta-platforms have received considerable Information Systems scholarly attention in recent years. Meta-platforms enable platform-to-platform openness and are especially beneficial to amplifying network effects in highly-specialized markets. A promising emerging context for applying meta-platforms is data marketplaces—a special type of digital platform designed for business data sharing that is vastly fragmented. However, data providers have sovereignty concerns: the risk of losing control over the data that they share through meta-platforms. This research aims to explore antecedents and consequences of data sovereignty concerns in meta-platforms for data marketplaces. Based on interviews with fifteen potential data providers and five data marketplace experts, we identify data sovereignty antecedents, such as (potentially) less trustworthy data marketplace participants, unclear use cases, and data provenance difficulties. Data sovereignty concerns have many consequences, including knowledge spillovers to competitors and reputational damage. This study is among the first that empirically develops a pre-conceptualization for data sovereignty in this novel context, thus laying the groundwork for designing future data marketplace meta-platform solutions.

Firms are often reluctant to share data because of mistrust, concerns over control, and other risks. Multi-party computation (MPC) is a new technique to compute meaningful insights without having to transfer data. This paper investigates if MPC affects known antecedents for data sharing decisions: control, trust, and risks. Through 23 qualitative interviews in the automotive industry, we find that MPC (1) enables new ways of technology-based control, (2) reduces the need for inter-organizational trust, and (3) prevents losing competitive advantage due to data leakage. However, MPC also creates the need to trust technology and introduces new risks of data misuse. These impacts arise if firms perceive benefits from sharing data, have high organizational readiness, and perceive data as non-sensitive. Our findings show that known antecedents of data sharing should be specified differently with MPC in place. Furthermore, we suggest reframing MPC as a data collaboration technology beyond enhancing privacy.

Purpose: This paper aims to propose a framework for how privacy-preserving technologies (PETs) create business value for organizations. The framework was developed by examining the literature on privacy and information technology’s impact (symbolic and function). The authors evaluate the framework’s applicability using multiparty computation (MPC) as an instance of PETs, with expert interviews in the telecommunication industry. Design/methodology/approach: In an illustrative case of four telecommunication companies, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with experts and used MPC as an instance of PET. Findings: The evaluation of the framework indicates that PETs create business value for organizations: enhancing customer interactions, sales, personalized services, predicting market trends and collaboration among organizations. The findings show that business value of PETs is mainly driven by consumers and organizations willing to share data and collaborate. Research limitations/implications: This study was limited to the telecom sector and focused on MPC as an instance of PET. Further studies should be conducted to explore the benefits of other PETs and MPC. Future research could find out if this framework is also helpful for implementing other PETs or even other types of technology. The authors’ framework provides factors that future studies can use to quantify the impact of PETs. The authors hope that this framework provides an overarching reference for organizations considering the adoption of PETs. Practical implications: The authors’ findings inform managers in exploring the business value of PETs for organizations. This study also provides insights into which costs and risks to consider when implementing PETs. Originality/value: This study is one of the few to propose a framework on how PETs create business value for organizations. Future research can use factors in the framework (e.g. customer interactions, sales, personalized services and market trend prediction) to conduct a quantitative study on PETs’ business value. Managers adopting PETs can use the framework to identify areas where PETs impact their organization.

Data platforms are the keystone of the data economy. When opened up, data platforms allow data owners, data consumers and third parties to interact. Yet, openness may also harm business and societal interests. Literature on platform openness does not cover data platforms, and data economy scholars rarely study platform openness. Therefore, this paper develops a research agenda on the openness of data platforms. We explore how data platforms differ from conventional digital platforms (e.g., software platforms). From those differentiating characteristics, we identify areas for future work: (1) The specific characteristics of data require reconceptualizing the object of platform openness; (2) New ways in which data platforms can be opened should be conceptualized; (3) As data platforms are tailored to specific industries, platform-to-platform openness should be a novel unit of analysis; (4) Because opening up data platforms create novel risks, new reasons to (not) open up data platforms should be studied.