Fostering a flexible and capillary data economy: the importance of effective public-private partnerships

The European Union aims to boost the Data Economy by promoting the free flow of data between member states and between strategic sectors, for the benefit of businesses, researchers, public administrations and citizens. Undoubtedly, data is a critical factor in the industrial and technological revolution we are experiencing, and therefore one of the EU's digital priorities is to capitalise on its latent value, relying on a single market where data can be shared under conditions of security and, above all, sovereignty, as this is the only way to guarantee indisputable European values and rights.

Thus, the European Data Strategy seeks to enhance the exchange of data on a large scale, under distributed and federated environments, while ensuring cybersecurity and transparency. To achieve scale, and to unlock the full potential of data in the digital economy, a key element is building trust. This, as a basic element that conditions the liquidity of the ecosystem, must be developed coherently across different areas and among different actors (data providers, users, intermediaries, service platforms, developers, etc.). Therefore, their articulation affects different perspectives, including business and functional, legal and regulatory, operational, and even technological. Therefore, success in these highly complex projects depends on developing strategies that seek to minimise barriers to entry for participants, and maximise the efficiency and sustainability of the services offered. This in turn translates into the development of data infrastructures and governance models that are easily scalable, and that provide the basis for effective data exchange to generate value for all stakeholders.

A methodology to boost data spaces

Spain has taken on the task of putting this European strategy into practice, and has been working for years to create an environment conducive to facilitating the deployment and establishment of a Sovereign Data Economy, supported, among other instruments, by the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. In this sense, and from its coordinating and enabling role, the Data Office has made efforts to design a general conceptual methodology , agnostic to a specific sector. It shapes the creation of data ecosystems around practical projects that bring value to the members of the ecosystem.

Therefore, the methodology consists of several elements, one of them being experimentation. This is because, by their flexible nature, data can be processed, modelled and thus interpreted from different perspectives. For this reason, experimentation is key to properly calibrate those processes and treatments needed to reach the market with pilots or business cases already close to the industries, so that they are closer to generating a positive impact. In this sense, it is necessary to demonstrate tangible value and underpin its sustainability, which implies, as a minimum, having:

• Frameworks for effective data governance
• Actions to improve the availability and quality of data, also seeking to increase their interoperability by design
• Tools and platforms for data exchange and exploitation.

Furthermore, given that each sector has its own specificity in terms of data types and semantics, business models, and participants' needs, the creation of communities of experts, representing the voice of the market, is another key element in generating useful projects. Based on this active listening, which leads to an understanding of the dynamics of data in each sector, it is possible to characterise the market and governance conditions necessary for the deployment of data spaces in strategic sectors such as tourism, mobility, agri-food, commerce, health and industry.

In this process of community building, data co-operatives play a fundamental role, as well as the more general figure of the data broker, which serves to raise awareness of the existing opportunity and favour the effective creation and consolidation of these new business models.

All these elements are different pieces of a puzzle with which to explore new business development opportunities, as well as to design tangible projects to demonstrate the differential value that data sharing will bring to the reality of industries. Thus, from an operational perspective, the last element of the methodology is the development of concrete use cases. These will also allow the iterative deployment of a catalogue of reusable experience and data resources in each sector to facilitate the construction of new projects. This catalogue thus becomes the centrepiece of a common sectoral and federated platform, whose distributed architecture also facilitates cross-sectoral interconnection.

On the shoulders of giants

It should be noted that Spain is not starting from scratch, as it already has a powerful ecosystem of innovation and experimentation in data, offering advanced services. We therefore believe it would be interesting to make progress in the harmonisation or complementarity of their objectives, as well as in the dissemination of their capacities in order to gain capillarity. Furthermore, the proposed methodology reinforces the alignment with European projects in the same field, which will serve to connect learning and progress from the national level to those made at EU level, as well as to put into practice the design tasks of the "cyanotypes" promulgated by the European Commission through the Data Spaces Support Centre.

Finally,the promotion of experimental or pilot projects also enables the development of standards for innovative data technologies, which is closely related to the Gaia-X project. Thus, the Gaia-X Hub Spain has an interoperability node, which serves to certify compliance with the rules prescribed by each sector, and thus to generate the aforementioned digital trust based on their specific needs.

At the Data Office, we believe that the interconnection and future scalability of data projects are at the heart of the effort to implement the European Data Strategy, and are crucial to achieve a dynamic and rich Data Economy, but at the same time a guarantor of European values and where traceability and transparency help to collectivise the value of data, catalysing a stronger and more cohesive economy.