With the core provisions of the EU Data Act taking effect in September 2025, Europe has launched its most ambitious regulatory effort in decades to reshape the industrial data economy. This project analyzes the practical implications of this shift, evaluating its success in preventing data lock-in and driving true market innovation.
A research collaboration with Aalto University’s School of Science (Departments of Industrial Engineering and Management, and Computer Science), School of Business (Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research, CKIR), and School of Engineering (Aalto Industrial Internet Campus, AIIC).
Overview
License to Value: Data Act Driven Transformation of Industrial Data Use is a 24-month Co-Research project led by Aalto University (PI: Dr. Timo Seppälä) with Combient Group as an industry partner. It examines how the EU Data Act reshapes industrial data use, value chains, and firm strategy, and what policy measures could accelerate beneficial transitions. The project runs through 8/2026–7/2028 and is organized into five work packages covering project management, preliminary research, data collection, analysis/writing, and dissemination.
Background and problem statement
The EU Data Act, with its core provisions enacted in September 2025, represents one of the most significant regulatory interventions in industrial data use in decades. The Act regulates who can access and use data generated by connected devices and related services. Its core goals are to unlock the value of industrial data, improve data portability, and prevent data lock-in by dominant platforms and companies.
The economic significance of the project
The EU Data Act grants new freedoms to access and use data from connected products and services but as noted above, does not itself compel action, so firm inertia or other factors could forfeit economic gains unless complemented by targeted innovation and industrial policy. Lower data-based entry barriers can bring a particular upside for SMEs and more efficient, dynamic value chains. Access to data can reduce switching costs, squeeze incumbents that rely on lock‑in, rewarding firms that compete on service quality and integration. By shifting some bargaining power from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)/platforms toward complementors, new business opportunities arise, creating new value capture along supply chains. Industrial manufacturing sectors are one fitting context for this happening where access to machine and operations data can lead to creation of new predictive maintenance, optimization, and third-party services.
The novelty of the research project
The novelty of the project lies in its timing, focus, and analytical perspective. First, the project targets a critical early implementation window. While the EU Data Act was adopted in 2023, its most impactful provisions only became applicable in late 2025. Existing studies are predominantly legal or ex-ante policy analyses; empirical research on real company behaviour, strategic choices, and emerging business practices is largely absent. This project will be among the first to systematically study how firms are reacting once the regulation starts to “bite”.
Second, the project moves beyond compliance to focus on strategic, economic and system-level implications. Instead of compliance, the research examines how firms reinterpret data access rights as strategic resources: Who invests in new data-driven services? Who reconfigures supplier and customer relationships? Who captures new value — and who risks losing it? This positions the project firmly within growth, value creation and industrial policy.
Third, the project explicitly addresses power in industrial data ecosystems. Industrial data has traditionally reinforced the dominance of actors controlling customer interfaces or proprietary platforms. The Data Act potentially disrupts these structures by redistributing access and usage rights. By analysing principals, suppliers, and data-intensive service firms simultaneously, the project introduces an ecosystem-level understanding of how data-enabled power structures evolve under regulation; this, in turn, may bear important consequences on how innovation policy should be conceived in the new situation.
Keywords: Data Act, New business opportunities, Manufacturing Industry, Research project
Photo © Picasso Museum, Malaga / Timo Seppälä
Text © Timo Seppälä, Ruurik Holm, Jari Juhanko, Ilkka Lakaniemi, Roy Nyberg, Marko Turpeinen