710749OpenINSIGHTClosedGRD Proof of ConceptInnovate UKMicro, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) make up 99.8% of all enterprises outside of financial services in Europe (European Commission, 2014). SMEs use a wide range of enterprise management software (such as accounting, CRM and project management packages) which they need to be very simple to use and low cost. There are, for example, numerous cloud-based accountancy packages some of which are very simple and cheap (even free) and aimed at micro companies with no dedicated accounting personnel and some of which are geared to larger SMEs who may typically have a Finance Director or CFO. Current solutions, however, only concern themselves with recording & reporting on the user’s own business. They do not provide a wider insight into how your business is operating in comparison to other, similar businesses (e.g. performance benchmarking of pricing, input costs or overheads) in order to deliver actionable insight. By their very nature, a Software as a Service offering – like our own Brightbook cloud-based accounting platform – captures and stores an enormous amount of data from it’s user base. In parallel the provision of open data from external public and private sources has been shown to enable the basis for innovative applications and initiatives that have delivered economic, social and environmental benefits. An example is opencorporates.com which has information on over 84million companies in 102 territories and is rapidly becoming the ‘go to’ destination for anyone needing information about companies globally. This R&D proof of concept project will investigate the technical feasibility of and commercial potential for technology that utilises aggregated user base data and external open data within an enterprise management SaaS platform to deliver valuable actionable insight to managers of small businesses.