Structural Characteristics of Stakeholder Relationships and Value Chain Network in Data Exchange Ecosystem

In recent years, data have been treated as economic goods, and have begun circulating into new forms of the ecosystem through data exchange. The increasing expectation that data exchange will be used to create new businesses and economic value requires a strong understanding of the overall structure and the characteristics of the data exchange ecosystem. However, unlike other well-known business ecosystems, such as the financial markets or service ecosystems, the data exchange ecosystem is immature and the observable interactions in the ecosystem are quite limited. In this study, we proposed a novel framework for describing the relationships and their interactions as the stakeholder-centric value chain (SVC) by focusing on the interactions among stakeholders, i.e., the business players who have an interest in the data business-as the core components of the ecosystem. We examined 45 businesses using SVC from 120 data business participants and elucidated some of the business structures with data exchange using network analysis, which was the first comprehensive empirical study on the data-mediated business relationships among stakeholders in the data exchange ecosystem. We found that the integrated network of data businesses consists of many densely connected clusters with numerous low-frequency stakeholders and shows the disassortative and hierarchical hub-and-spoke structure. The results suggest that a few stakeholders monopolize links with many others and that a segregation of stakeholders appears in the ecosystem. Our approach and the results provide the important insights for all stakeholders in the data exchange ecosystem and those who consider entering the market.