Data spaces continue to evolve rapidly, shaping how organisations collaborate, share data, and build value-driven ecosystems. As these initiatives mature, the need for practical guidance—both on financial sustainability and participant adoption—has become increasingly clear.
To support this growing community, the Data Spaces Support Centre recently released two new papers, offering essential insights grounded in real-world examples and community expertise.
Launching or scaling a data space is complex. Financial viability, sustainable governance models, and participant uptake remain key challenges across sectors. These two papers address these hurdles head-on, providing actionable insights for practitioners, policymakers, and organisations designing or evolving data space initiatives.
Two new papers offer key insights into the business and sustainability dimensions of data spaces, providing practical strategies and recommendations drawn from real-world experience. They support initiatives aiming for financial sustainability, stronger value creation, and increased participant adoption.
The Business perspective paper highlights how financially sustainable data spaces can be built by balancing public and private interests, using multi-sided business thinking, and iteratively refining core business dimensions.
The Strategic Stakeholder Forum (SSF) paper examines current realities in sustainability and adoption—across several Common EU Data Spaces—and presents forward-looking recommendations to drive uptake.
The paper called Business perspective of inspiring Data Space examples, shows the mechanisms that enable the financial sustainability of data spaces. Despite hundreds of data space initiatives, only a few have discovered viable business models to become self-sustaining. The paper provides practical insights for those starting, managing, or revisiting data space initiatives to come to this financial sustainability. The focus of the paper is on the business challenge – the balance between cost and revenues – based on two perspectives:
- Public vs. Private: Publicly oriented data spaces focus on societal challenges, open standards, and data quality, often relying on grants. Risks include underutilization, limited commercial development, and lack of value capture for private actors. Private initiatives prioritize financial returns, focusing on paying customers and commercially viable use cases, but may lack inclusivity and public value. Mixed financing models can balance these approaches, fostering inclusiveness and sustainability.
- Linear vs. Multi-sided: Linear models deliver products/services directly to customers, requiring upfront investment. Multi-sided models enable interactions between multiple providers and customers, leveraging network effects. Multi-sided models are harder to establish, needing iterative development and experimentation to balance supply and demand. The “Valley of Death”—the gap between proof of concept and financial sustainability—is a major hurdle, often requiring public funding to overcome market failures.
The paper “Participant adoption and sustainability in data spaces” is a result of collaborative efforts driven by the DSSC, its Strategic Stakeholder Forum and other community members. It dives into two prioritised community themes reflecting pressing challenges in data spaces and emerging insights that should be documented to support collective growth. The paper builds upon existing literature - some recent and relevant publications - and couples it with community experiences both from European initiatives, including several common European data spaces (CEADS, DeployEMDS, GDI, LDS, SAGE, TEMS) and beyond, as well as insights from data space participants. This allows building a holistic view over current realities in participant adoption and sustainability and leads to recommendations for future scaling of the data space ecosystem.
The paper concludes with a set of 9 recommendations, relevant for different target audiences (data spaces, the DSSC or policy makers).
Download the papers here.