Innovation with Open Data: to what extent is there a role for government to stimulate enterprise and market making in the use of open data?

The answer is to make it available and let people use it, they will always surprise you. If government makes it data available, it does not then need to become a venture capitalist as well, even if it was any good at that sort of thing (which historically it isn't!).

There's an interesting lesson in the Ordnance Survey whose proposed business has been all but destroyed by Google maps.

What are the implications for existing services?

Will the private sector use this dat to exploiit opportunities to replace public services?

Innovation should improve services and should be shared across the relvenat sectors.

I really think this is anarea which could be part of the public task for the PDC.

Require it, in return for operating in a commercial environment, to go out and create a vibrant developer/data user community with conferences and engagement events, online and offline.

Yes, aside from core data, using forums and data requests from the public, groups and organisations should stimulate debate and allow request for new data to be identified. However, it is importnant that data sets are develop to meet a need and not for themselves. There is a lot of data that could be published but it may not add any value to anyone.

You could sponsor research , offer funding or  prizes for developing datasets in specific areas. You should also think about developing tools that present and analyse data and offer funding / prizes for these. Encouraging use of open source softwware to manipulate data would also be useful.

The government has put great energies into this with little in terms of results, so this is obviously not the way to go. A first step would be to innovate within government by meeting a key need, possibly policy driven.