#IDCC16 Day 0: business models for research data management

I’m at the International Digital Curation Conference 2016 (#IDCC16) in Amsterdam this week. It’s always a good opportunity to pick up some new ideas and catch up with colleagues from around the world, and I always come back full of new possibilities. I’ll try and do some more reflective posts after the conference but I thought I’d do some quick reactions while everything is still fresh.

Monday and Thursday are pre- and post-conference workshop days, and today I attended Developing Research Data Management Services. Joy Davidson and Jonathan Rans from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) introduced us to the Business Model Canvas, a template for designing a business model on a single sheet of paper. The model prompts you to think about all of the key facets of a sustainable, profitable business, and can easily be adapted to the task of building a service model within a larger institution. The DCC used it as part of the Collaboration to Clarify Curation Costs (4C) project, whose output the Curation Costs Exchange is also worth a look.

It was a really useful exercise to be able to work through the whole process for an aspect of research data management (my table focused on training & guidance provision), both because of the ideas that came up and also the experience of putting the framework into practice. It seems like a really valuable tool and I look forward to seeing how it might help us with our RDM service development.

Tomorrow the conference proper begins, with a range of keynotes, panel sessions and birds-of-a-feather meetings so hopefully more then!