No digitization without data. Without "digitization," most market participants can expect competitive disadvantages in almost all areas. In the future, the "data economy" will contribute a relevant share of GDP in Germany (see Engels/Goeke 2019, p. 17 et seq.), and research will not only make little progress without (good) data, it will also make data in its economically comprehensible form its own subject (see Azkan et al. 2020).

In "THE EUROPEAN DATA MARKET MONITORING TOOL KEY FACTS & FIGURES, FIRST POLICY CONCLUSIONS, DATA LANDSCAPE AND QUANTIFIED STORIES D2.9 Final Study Report 2020" basic models and data are provided, as well as corresponding definitions.

„The Data Economy measures the overall impacts of the Data Market on the economy as a whole. It involves the generation, collection, storage, processing, distribution, analysis elaboration, delivery, and exploitation of data enabled by digital technologies. The Data Economy includes the direct, indirect, and induced effects of the Data Market on the economy.“ (a.a.O., S. 38)

„The Data Market is the marketplace where digital data is exchanged as “products” or “services” as a result of the elaboration of raw data. We define its value as the aggregate value of the demand of digital data without measuring the direct, indirect and induced impacts of data in the economy as a whole. The value of the Data Market includes imports (data products and services bought on the global digital market from suppliers not based in Europe) and excludes the exports of the European data companies.“ (a.a.O., S. 87)

The development of the data economy is being challenged by the GDPR at the macro, meso and micro levels. A discourse has arisen, often not only factual, about whether the GDPR as it stands is more beneficial or detrimental to successful economic development. The perspectives range from a clearly negative, rather negative (as also tended to be shared by the initiators of the "Dataprotection Landscape") to a rather positive or even clearly positive assessment. In this context, extremely complex and fundamental questions such as the ownership of data also play a controversial role.

The broad landscape of theoretical considerations, innovation realities in companies and competitive challenges will be shown here in the course of the coming weeks and months in a growing and explorable way.

Azkan, C./Goecke/H./Spiekermann, M. (2020): Forschungsbereiche der Datenökonomie, in: Wirtschaftsdienst 100, S. 124–127 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10273-020-2582-x
Engels, B./Goecke, H. (2019): Big Data in Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft. Eine Bestandsaufnahme, in: IW-Analysen (130)
International Data Corporation (IDC) (2020):THE EUROPEAN DATA MARKET MONITORING TOOL KEY FACTS & FIGURES, FIRST POLICY CONCLUSIONS, DATA LANDSCAPE AND QUANTIFIED STORIES D2.9 Final Study Report, DOI: 10.2759/72084