Why we run the European Data Spaces Awards
An award programme is an unusual instrument for a support centre. The DSSC publishes guidance, runs a support desk and brings the community together. The European Data Spaces Awards belong in this list because they do something the other instruments cannot.
Data spaces in Europe have entered what we sometimes call season two. The design questions of the early years are largely answered. What decides the fate of a data space today is whether it is used productively and whether it can pay for itself. A growing number of initiatives across Europe are now working through exactly these questions.
Guidance documents help with this only up to a point. The Blueprint describes the building blocks a data space needs. It cannot show how a particular consortium in agriculture or manufacturing turned those building blocks into a service that participants pay for. Only the initiatives themselves can show that, and the awards bring those examples into the open.
Making the invisible part of the community visible
The first edition of the European Data Spaces Awards drew more than 60 applications from initiatives across 11 EU Member States, a large share of them from parts of the community that do not appear in the usual circles and do not interact with the DSSC team from week to week. Six finalists were selected: Catena-X, data.gouv.fr and DjustConnect in the category Excellence in End-User Engagement and Financial Sustainability, and DEPLOYTOUR, SM4RTENANCE and sphin-X e.V. in the category Most Innovative Emerging Data Space. DjustConnect, an agri-food data space built on transparency and farmer ownership, won the first category. sphin-X e.V., a collaborative healthcare data space that preserves data sovereignty for every participant, won the second. Both winners and all nominees were celebrated on stage at the Data Spaces Symposium 2026 in Madrid. The award call reached them, their work became visible to everyone else and the 2027 winners will receive the same stage.
The DSSC exists so that what works in one place can be adopted in another and so that nobody has to reinvent the wheel. An award programme pulls concrete, evidenced practice out of initiatives and puts it in front of their peers. The awards are therefore a proof point for the community and for the DSSC itself, a check on whether the support we offer is producing data spaces that work.
What the European Commission is looking for
Since the European strategy for data in 2020, the European Commission has built the framework for trusted data sharing and reuse, through the Data Governance Act and the Data Act, and has funded data space projects across 14 strategic sectors. The Data Union Strategy now shifts attention towards increasing the supply of data for AI and simplifying the rules around it.
Data spaces keep their central role in this agenda if they become financially sustainable at scale and put users at the centre. The 2027 awards highlight precisely these priorities, and the Commission has encouraged initiatives to use them as a platform to showcase their work and gain recognition.
Why applying pays off before any winner is named
The maturity self-assessment that forms part of the application is built on CEN/CLC/TS 18331:2026, the CEN-CENELEC technical specification on the maturity assessment of Common European Data Spaces (CEDS), and covers six dimensions from governance to trust. An initiative that completes it receives a neutral picture of where it stands, measured against a published European specification and against its peer group. That picture is useful in conversations with prospective data providers and data users, well beyond the awards themselves.
The application document runs to eight pages at most, which leaves no room for general claims. Applicants gather evidence of how their data space actually operates. The applicant learns from this as much as the evaluators do, and the collected evidence reaches the whole community once nominees are announced.
Visibility that works on both sides
There is no monetary prize. All nominees join the ceremony at the Data Spaces Symposium in Brussels on 9 March 2027 and are part of a communication campaign run by the DSSC. This includes a profile on the DSSC website, a dedicated feature in the DSSC newsletter, an announcement series on DSSC social channels and an invitation to present in a DSSC public webinar.
All applicants gain something from applying. The maturity self-assessment is part of the application, and every applicant receives a set of maturity indicators to track progress over time and benchmark against peers. Evaluators see these results as additional context. The qualitative assessment of the application decides the outcome.
A data space grows when data providers and data users trust it enough to join, and public recognition from a neutral European programme makes both sides easier to convince.
The first edition showed how much serious work is under way across Europe's data spaces, much of it out of sight. The 2027 edition is the opportunity to put that work on the record. Applications are open until 2 November 2026, and everything needed to apply is on the European Data Spaces Awards page.