Tracking Entrepreneurship with Open Data

Startups that develop web apps played an important role in bringing the internet to what we know as "web 2.0" today. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, and others redefined the web to be "socially" enhanced making it easy to share, form connections, and track what users "like". Ironically, it may not be startups who lead us from community-type websites to the next generation of the web.  Instead, we're starting to see governments and NGO's leading the rally for open data initiatives and linked data, which are both becoming the foundation for the growth of the semantic web.

For example, take a look at the new World Bank Open Data site and Data.gov. Both are making thousands of data sets available for open consumption to find, download, use, re-use, and to build applications on.

The launch of data.worldbank.org is part of the World Bank's Open Data Initiative. Open data will be a key tool to track and measure progress of poverty and other important world indicators. These massive data sets will provide the foundation for creating apps and visualization tools that will help use better understand the world around us.

“I believe it’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone. Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development.”

Robert B. Zoellick

World Bank President

For example, let's use data.worldbank.org to track the growth of entrepreneurship and how development of new companies varies from country to country. We find in the World Development Indicators that we can examine the number of new registered companies that is taken from one of the International Finance Corporations' data sets.

This data is hard to interpret in this form. So, let's toggle to the map view:

Now we can easily see that the following countries are leading the world with the given numbers from 2005 - 2007. Granted these need to be updated and I'm sure it'll get better over time. But, it's a great starting point.

You can even drill down further to compare some other interesting data points such as: % of firms using banks to finance investment, merchandise trade (% of GDP), number of startup procedures to register the business, and lead time to export or import.

Think about how important this could be. For countries that have lower number of new registered businesses per year - we can start using comparisons to determine where public policy needs to be changed. Or - determine what areas will be most vital in creating a more fertile ground for new businesses in developing countries.

About the Author

Alex Lindahl

Editor, OpenEconomist

Alex Lindahl is the founder and editor of OpenEconomist. During the day he works in sales and runs software publishing at Acquia, an open source startup that is commercializing Drupal.