Madrid, November 21, 2024.- The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Function, Óscar López, has presented the ‘Plan to Boost Data Spaces’, an initiative that groups together all the opportunities that the new data economy opens and that converge with the European perspective, and has announced a new economic endowment, of 300 million, with which the Plan will mobilize a total of 500 million euros to boost the data spaces in the industry. The minister indicated that “the objective of this Plan is to promote and accelerate the deployment of sectoral data spaces in all productive sectors in Spain so that companies, and the economy in general, can benefit from the potential of the future European single data market, generating new opportunities for innovation and improving competitiveness”
The creation of data spaces will reach different strategic sectors such as agri-food, sustainable mobility, the health sector, the trade sector and the tourism sector. In addition to the promotion of the sectoral data spaces, the development, exploitation and sharing of the same among these sectors will be promoted.
11 initiatives and six lines of action
This Plan is implemented through 11 measures contained in six action axes and a governance scheme that will be implemented during the period 2024-2026. The Plan will be endowed with a total budget of EUR 500 million financed through investment 1 of component 12 – sectoral data spaces – and investment 2 of component 14 – tourism data space – within the framework of the Transformation and Resilience Recovery Plan (PRTR) and the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR).
Of the six axes of action or lines of action, three of them are strategic: promoters, companies and the technological industry. These are complemented by three other transversal axes, which are the enablers, the public data, and the promotion and dissemination.
Some of the initiatives contained in the Plan are already under way, such as those relating to the promotion of data spaces in the tourism sector or the call for Sectoral Data Spaces through which EUR 80M is being mobilised for 90 innovative projects, such as the sharing of clinical data between hospitals to improve the diagnosis and early detection of diseases or the optimization of data from transport companies in cities to improve the mobility offer.
In addition, the minister has announced that before the end of the year two new calls for Data Spaces will be opened, one for use cases and another for products and services linked to the data spaces, with a budget of more than 100 million euros in total.
Distribution of Plan Initiatives
In the presentation event, organized by Red.es, an entity attached to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function and which will execute several of the Plan’s initiatives, the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, María González Veracruz, the Director-General of Red.es, Jesús Herrero, the Director-General of Dato, Ruth del Campo, and António Biason, Legal and Policy Officer at the European Commission, as well as representatives of the Ministries of Agriculture, Transport and Health.
The Plan for Promoting Sectoral Data Spaces can be consulted at: https://datos.gob.es/es/noticia/plan-de-impulso-de-los-espacios-de-datos_sectoriales