When The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, together with The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, launched the new weather service yr.no in 2007, it quickly became one of the most popular websites in Norway. Five years later, statistics show that the majority of the Norwegian population are frequent users of yr.no, also serving as a motivation for a first introduction to the Internet for many senior citizens.  
Besides covering the need for weather information for end users, with the making of yr.no a revolution took place: The institute decided to stop selling weather information that was produced by the core service. Hence, all data and products that you can see on yr.no as numbers, figures and animations are available as open data. The consequence was that we gave up a marginal income in favour for the society at large.
In the context of empowering enterprises which are oriented towards new and innovative technologies, we believe a new attitude of openness within the public sector is one important source we have to explore and exploit. In order to do so, there is a need of a change in attitude in the governmental institutions and agencies on practicing openness as more than obeying the legal duty of transparency. The new openness is about making the results of our work available to the public, the ones that funds our service. Our work should be available for re-use with no restrictions. We believe that allowing re-users to have free access to data will have a huge potential to become an important contribution to foster innovation and value creation in the business sector.
At The Norwegian Meteorological Institute we are practicing this new way of openness in many ways: Our data and products are available as machine readable data (raw data).The institute provides downloading facilities as an integrated part of the yr.no-systems. Our systems are designed to take both care of our core services and the re-users, a design that had the re-users in mind from the start. Furthermore, software programs that are developed in-house are made available through open licenses; software can be freely used by anyone for their own purposes.  Our research department has a significant production of scientific publications. These are published under “open access” licenses, and are available for anyone, whether they are researchers, scholars or entrepreneurs looking for new business opportunities.
Our policies are in accordance with the spirit of the PSI Directive and the goals in the ICT policy of the Norwegian Government. One of the priority areas in the ICT policy is “contributing to innovation and value creation in the business sector by arranging for development and use of services based on a digital content, making public data accessible for further use and distribution […]”.
My goal in this lecture is to inspire the participants of the European Data Forum with our unique experience as a case study, and experience related to both the legal environment and experience from our dialogue with the re-use community.  This way we could inspire to embrace this new way of thinking, giving some eye-opening examples from our extensive experience. I will try to show that this can foster innovation in more than one way – and in ways that we have not could foresee some years ago. For instance, in windmill projects, smart house technology and construction of ships hulls.