Data ecosystems and enablers (ENABLED)

Data is the fuel of the digital economy.

The Data Ecosystems and Enablers (ENABLED) project of the JRC provides dedicated scientific evidence to the implementation of data sharing policies in Europe, in support to the European Data Union Strategy.

The new strategy will build on the Common European Data Spaces, as well as the underpinning legal instruments (Data Act, Data Governance Act, Open Data Directive, Implementing Act on High-Value Datasets and AI Act), to ultimately improve access to data and stimulate innovative business developments.

Within this context, there are many outstanding organisational, technical, legal and economic aspects that are critically important for the successful implementation of the strategy.

The project aims at seizing the opportunities of connecting data, infrastructures and activities to data space policies, as well as on adopting relevant data space practices and tools which will also support the JRC work on:

competences and technologies for digital transformation
EU competitiveness and innovation
innovation in policymaking

Focus Areas

ENABLED focus areas are horizontal organisational and technical aspects of data sharing. Experiments and learnings will be co-created and validated with relevant policy and scientific peers supporting:

contribution towards the advancement of research on data sharing in the EU
testing a JRC prototypical data space
establishment of a JRC data innovation policy lab, which designs and implements regulatory and technical experiments in a controlled sandbox environment

Policy Impact

The European Data Union Strategy builds on the 2020 European Strategy for Data and the Staff Working Documents on common European Data Spaces, outlining the establishment of a single market for data in Europe. ENABLED supports these initiatives by identifying use cases to better understand governance and technical aspects of European data ecosystems along with their different actors, roles, barriers, enablers, and interactions across areas of interest such as Digital twins, Virtual Worlds and Generative AI.

The project will support policies through:

Scientific evidence in support of data-driven innovation in Europe
Policy recommendations for the implementation and evolution of EU policies around data sharing
JRC data innovation policy lab

Goals

To study the actors, roles, barriers, and enablers in data ecosystems in order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different governance and technical approaches related to data sharing, leveraging sandboxing for the evaluation of different policy options.
To inform the implementation of the European Data Union Strategy, building on the European strategy for data, the related horizontal legislation and the common European data spaces at multiple levels of governance.
To establish a JRC data innovation policy lab as a means to meet the first two goals. The aim of the Lab is to design and implement dedicated regulatory and technical experiments in a controlled sandbox environment with policy and scientific peers to facilitate the uptake of data-driven innovation at scale.