Creating value from data in an ecosystem: building and expanding relationships between data and seemingly distant usages

Creating socioeconomic value from data seems to be a shared concern in almost every industry, public and research area. In this paper, "value" is taken in a large meaning considering that creating value boils down to connecting data and usages. In the Earth Observation field, this concern is all the more challenging as data and usages often seem to be "distant"-that is not related at first sight. This paper explores the question of how to build relationships in such a context and how these relationships can evolve over time. Our analysis is based on the historical case study of a research lab that has progressively build services for solar energy. The importance of several elements is enhanced: (1) a new interpretation of the role of "information" in the value creation process, as playing a pivotal role between usages and data, which is thus proposed to be coined "inter-formation"; (2) the importance of how models are designed, suggesting a new way of gaining a competitive advantage that is not only focused on the nature of data or final usages, but on the structure of models; (3) the related expansion dynamic of the ecosystem, suggesting a specific form of expansion that is related to all the elements of the data-usage relationship, and not only thanks to data pushing for new usages or usages pushing for new data. These findings contribute to bring some insights on the creation and expansion of data-based ecosystems, at both organization and ecosystem's levels.