Barriers to Data Sharing among Private Sector Organizations

In today’s digital world, sharing data among private sector organizations to realm mutual benefits, such as innovation and value co-creation, is considered a promising yet barely explored and realized approach. Although private sector organizations are pursuing data sharing, successful real-world examples are sparse due to a multitude of barriers. However, knowledge on barriers to data sharing among private sector organizations is scarcely existent in scientific literature. Therefore, we apply an exploratory research approach by triangulating insights from fourteen expert interviews and a systematic literature review to identify barriers which we group along five distinct perspectives. By exploring the multi-faceted barriers to data sharing among private sector organizations, our work contributes to a better understanding of data sharing in this field and lays the foundation for future studies. For practitioners, we identify key challenges to successful data sharing among private sector organizations and, hence call for additional endeavors in data sharing.