Innovalia Association is a private and independent technological centre with a strong orientation towards industrial innovation, digital transformation and advanced support for small and medium sized enterprises. Its focus is on Industry 4.0, innovation services, and the translation of research and technological development into practical industrial uptake. Innovalia also has a strong European project background, including activities linked to manufacturing digitalisation, industrial data ecosystems and cross sector data exchange. This positioning makes the organisation a relevant partner for CIRCMAN5.0, a project that combines circular manufacturing objectives with data driven methods, AI based support, and trusted digital infrastructures for the photovoltaic value chain.
Figure 1. The different Innovalia Association subunits arranged by area of focus.
Within the broader European data spaces landscape, Innovalia brings experience that is directly relevant to the collaborative space ambitions of CIRCMAN5.0. Innovalia acted as coordinator of DataSpace 4.0, an initiative aimed at creating a common governance framework for industrial data sharing at European level, and of SM4RTENANCE, where it addresses legal, business and technical requirements for a common data ecosystem in manufacturing equipment. Innovalia facilitates the IDSA Hub in Spain, with a role in technology development, business development, ecosystem development, skill development and SME support. Innovalia Association is also listed among the founding members of the Green Deal Dataspace association, another CIRCMAN5.0. Together, these activities show that the organisation can offer a wide-ranging support: technical deployment, governance, stakeholder alignment and ecosystem building around trustworthy data exchange.
Figure 2. A sample of R&D projects where Innovalia participated, having coordinated RE4DY, DATASPACE4.0, SM4RTENANCE and TEMS.
In CIRCMAN5.0, Innovalia’s background translates into a concrete role in shaping the project’s collaborative and data sharing dimension. Innovalia’s in-project efforts are the largest in the data-space-related activities. Their contribution is expected to stem from prior data space experience and good practices, especially those emerging from SM4RTENANCE and TEMS, and to support data space harmonisation within CIRCMAN5.0. This role is consistent with the two-part introductory workshop on data spaces delivered by Innovalia for the consortium, where the overall concept and the core mechanics of data exchange were presented as an enabling basis for the subsequent Collaborative Space work. In conjunction with GDDS and CERTH, the first Proof-of-Concept demonstrator for the Collaborative Space is being rounded up, at the time of writing.