The food system and agriculture are currently undergoing simultaneous sustainability, profitability, digitalization, and data legislation transformations. This situation creates a significant discontinuity in the operational field of food chains and systems. It is clear that companies and other actors need to develop new understanding and tools suitable for the new needs to achieve desired outcomes. In line with the EU's data strategy, data spaces are a key tool in this.
In the project, Viikki Food Design Factory leads the work package ‘Future Ecosystem of Our Data’. The objectives are to:
In particular, Our Data project’s research focuses 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 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 Nature Resources Institute Finland Luke (coordination), VTT, University of Helsinki (Viikki Food Design Factory), and University of Tampere.
Viikki Food Design Factory’s role is to facilitate the implementation of the scientific knowledge into the
ecosystem and business development of the Our data project companies with co-creation methodologies.
The project involves 20 companies of different sizes in the digital grain chain ecosystem as co-funders and in-kind contributors. These include: