Emerging Approaches for Data-Driven Innovation in Europe

Background and scope

The digital transformation of the European economy and society is framed by the European strategy for data that foresees the establishment of a common European data space based on domain-specific data spaces in strategic sectors such as environment, agriculture, industry, health and transportation.

Acknowledging the key role that emerging technologies and innovative approaches for data sharing and use can play to make European data spaces a reality. The research and experiments collected in the report investigated emerging technologies and innovative approaches for data sharing and use, and the socio-technical factors and forces that occur in data-driven innovation. The results shed some light in terms of lessons learned and provide practical recommendations towards the establishment of European data spaces.

A sandbox approach is taken so that the findings presented in the document are based on concrete empirical evidence, collected through a set of experiments, specifically designed and developed to explore emerging technologies and tools for data-driven innovation, and to investigate the socio-technical factors and forces
that occur in data-driven innovation.

The successful implementation and added value of the European data spaces require aligning EU policy developments with local, regional and commercial practices, to anticipate, facilitate and participate in the implementation of strategies based on mutual understanding. The European technological landscape includes multiple small and medium enterprises combined with a healthy open source community of developers and early adopters. This potential can be harnessed and act as an enabler for the implementation of the European strategy for data

The experiments with binary data encodings show that they have both advantages and disadvantages when compared to the de facto standards such as XML, JSON and GeoJSON.

The document addresses key organisational and social aspects of data-driven innovation in local communities and public sector organisations and argues that there is a dearth of empirical research on current practices.

The nature of emerging technologies, architectures, standards and approaches covered in this document is crosscutting. They can be studied from multiple angles, including the social, economic and technological perspectives that can altogether inform the scoping of policies that can be operationalised and lead to data-driven innovation at scale.