Our Data Ecosystem for Value Added Grain

The future digital environment brings challenges and opportunities, also for the agriculture and food sector. The EU's data strategy and related new legislation are changing the landscape of the data economy, emphasizing data sovereignty and trust-based use of data in business ecosystems. The Our Data project will provide solutions to enable companies to participate in the technical and business ecosystems of the fair data economy and to create new business models based on their own initiative, autonomy and the use of data under their control in many ways. In particular, research will focus on the collaborative use of data ('our data') for business development in primary production and related enterprises, and in particular on the scaling of business in data networks by SMEs, including start-ups, enabled by data space mechanisms.

The project will explore and develop common industry solutions that are still missing in data ecosystems but are necessary for smooth data exploitation, such as data quality and harmonization, common data descriptors and vocabularies, and services to provide these in the data space. The use case is a fair data economy business ecosystem for the supply chain of data-enriched grain from primary production to the buyer, either for export or domestic processing.

The project will result in new knowledge and methodologies on how to develop business models that comply with the new EU data legislation and exploit the mechanisms of data spaces among actors, and how to scale business in the data space by producing, sharing and exploiting high quality 'our data' for the common benefit of the ecosystem.

The project is a co-research project aimed at increasing the longer-term competitiveness of the sector. The working approach will include literature reviews on standards, information models and legislation, interviews and co-creation workshops, systemic design, systems analysis and proof-of-concept prototyping of new technical solutions.

Research partners are Luke (coordination), VTT, University of Helsinki, University of Tampere. The project involves 20 companies of different sizes in the digital grain chain ecosystem as co-funders and in-kind contributors.