Accelerating adoption of Data Spaces: From theory to practice

European Data Strategy aims EU to become a leading role model for a society empowered by data to make better decisions, both in business and the public sector. To fulfil this ambition the EU relies on: (i) a strong legal framework in terms of data protection, fundamental rights, safety, and cybersecurity, and (ii) internal markets with companies of all sizes and varieties. In this context of fair data sharing and technical advancements, data spaces emerge as key instruments to foster the European data economy.

After the launch by the European Commission one year ago of the first preparatory actions for sectorial data spaces, and the Data Space Support Centre (DSSC) as the instrument to drive and harmonize all these efforts, now it is time to move from theory to practice, increasing the awareness about the potential of European data spaces for data sharing, and fostering the adoption and onboarding process from industry and end users. In this sense, this evolution on maturity is crucial to create a genuine single market for data, open to data from across the world, where personal as well as non-personal data (like sensitive business data) are secure, and business have easy access to an almost infinite amount of high-quality industrial data, boosting growth, and creating value.

Therefore, the objective of this session is three-fold:

• To evaluate what has been done by the different initiatives during the last months, and what we can learn from the experience.
• To identify barriers, solutions / success stories, and propose incentives for industry and society to adopt and onboard data spaces.
• Leverage on the lessons learnt and agree on the most appropriate next steps to overcome those barriers, in order to accelerate the process of adoption.

The session will count with main actors in the field, including relevant cross-cutting initiatives (BDVA and DSSC in its role of supporting European data spaces developments and providing an outlook of its activities and assets available for all European stakeholders), representatives of vertical data spaces (including the view from industry), and experimentation environments who are also providing access to SMEs (i-Spaces / ITI). Ultimately, the session will try to provide an answer to the question of how far are we now from the envisioned objectives, and what is the right future direction?

Find session’s agenda here