Making (and Saving) Money with Open Data - Dissemination Event in Birmingham

Birmingham City University positioned themselves at the centre of the open data agenda by hosting an event called ‘Making (and Saving) Money with Open Data’; exploring ways business can make money through the influx of public data being released by government.

Opportunities to innovate and create new services around this data are many but what are the business models that will sustain such activity?  The University recognised this is a huge challenge facing digital and IT companies and in response invited successful data businesses to speak to those working across public and private sector, to help make working with Open Data more of an opportunity than a risk.

The event gave delegates a technical insight into Open Data projects. SME’s Podnosh and Substrakt teamed up to collaborate under the Speeddata banner to deliver a hands on workshop, aimed at developing ideas for useful, commercial and social open data projects.

Each small group was asked to come up with an idea. Get help refining it. Discover data sources. Understand the technological approach and tools available. See how the idea can be visually represented effectively and then practice a pitch in readiness for the panel of judges.

At the end, each group pitched their idea to a judging panel: Dave Harte, Award Leader, MA Social Media at Birmingham City University and Simon Jenner of Adventures in Business and founder of Urban Coffee Company.

Dave Harte, Senior lecturer in MA Social Media said "Our event showed that there is a real appetite amongst creative companies to work on innovate open data projects and that they see the university as playing a key role in helping them identify project ideas and develop business cases for them. At the event, the community of open data activists in Birmingham have showed that this is an agenda in which collaboration and the open exchange of ideas is crucial."

If you would like to view more information and photographs from this event, please visit this link. http://podnosh.com/blog/2011/04/14/making-and-saving-money-with-open-data-ideas-generation-session