Opportunities of external data within companies in promoting new business and sustainability on the real estate and construction sector

Digitalization is the current trend across all sectors, which is expected to provide new business opportunities, resource efficiency and climate change mitigation. One of the new key resources brought by digitalization is an improved knowledge of clients or users through new data. This knowledge is usually created with business intelligence, i.e. data gathering and analysis. Business intelligence has been the most important success factor for companies in several industries, in particular information technology. Data is gathered, distributed and analysed by platforms, which also promote external innovation. In most successful cases this has lead to successful ecosystems where owners, users and complementors innovate and develop content for the platform in cooperation with each other. However, similar platforms and ecosystems have not yet emerged in a large scale to the real estate and construction (REC) sector.On REC sector smart buildings provide an excellent opportunity to gather data of conditions, indoor environment and user behaviour. This data can be used for developing the current products and services as well as new ones. However, currently only a small share of the companies on the REC sector actually have an access to the data provided by smart buildings. Additionally, the data is seldom distributed outside the company borders. Although the commercialization of external data is currently a hot topic in the academic literature, the companies on REC sector have not been utilizing it yet. External distribution of the data would also enable companies who do not have access to the data to develop their products and services accordingly.Large scale distribution and utilization of data would promote cost and resource efficiency in current products and services as well as new business oppotunities. In addition to building specific data, big data generated by large number of smart buildings would rapidly provide valuable information for example to building design, construction material manufacturing, energy production and insurance sectors just to name a few. The transformation to external data commercialization and distribution would require some stakeholder reorganization in the sector . The roles in the ecosystems benefiting of data distribution have already been discussed in the literature. Lerning from the roles and platforms on other industries, the REC sector should be able to better benefit of the new opportunities of digitalization.