Big Data for Open Digital Innovation – A Research Roadmap

Digital technologies have fundamentally altered the nature of organizing innovation and production leading to open collaboration ecosystems. Individuals self-organize in open, voluntary technology-enabled collectives to share their enhancements to the data or collaborate on analyzing, disseminating, or leveraging the data for many applications, from enterprise computing to mobile, consumer oriented applications. ‘Big data’ is an increasingly important ‘engine’ to better understand the complex ‘nervous system’ of open collaboration. However, we need to equip open collaboration researchers with new datasets that span different contexts, as well as novel computational models and analytical techniques. In this paper, we will elaborate on research questions concerning open digital collaboration and derive the data analytical challenges that need to be addressed to answer these research questions.