The Catena‑X Spain Competence Centre at Data Spaces Symposium 2026

During 10–11 February, the Competence Centre of Catena-X in Spain took part as a speaker and roundtable participant at the Data Spaces Symposium 2026 held in Madrid.

Óscar Lázaro de Barrio, Managing Director of Innovalia, moderated the session “From vision to value: data space success stories in manufacturing & supply chain”, focused on sharing experiences on scaling industrial data spaces toward resilient and interoperable ecosystems. These discussions brought together highly relevant voices from organizations such as VDMA, Airbus, AEF, ETP, Ford, Siemens, and DataPixel, among others. Both the Hub and the Competence Centre of Catena-X in Spain also participated in this session. This practical approach aligns directly with the Competence Centre’s mission: to provide active support for the sustainable adoption of Catena-X, especially by SMEs.

The automotive industry is facing increasingly demanding technological, regulatory, and business challenges, and no company can solve them alone. Catena‑X has already launched a fully operational infrastructure for sovereign data exchange. The key challenge now is adoption of that infrastructure across the entire value chain, hence Catena-X’s deployment of national Competence Centres and Hubs.

In Spain, this role was particularly necessary: a clear reference point was needed to access the digital offering in an organized way and to experience firsthand what it means to run processes on a Catena-X infrastructure. For this reason, the Competence Centre of Catena-X in Spain positions itself as a neutral, open service environment for providers and industrial stakeholders, acting as a trusted guide for companies through clear adoption pathways.

Adopting data spaces is always challenging: technical complexity, regulatory requirements, interoperability, trust, and the need for rapid results all play a part. The main scaling challenge we see is ensuring that companies—especially SMEs—can access a reliable, interoperable, and validated digital offering, avoiding “blind trials” and reducing the learning curve.

In this context, Silvia Rodríguez Del Rey, General Secretary of the Competence Centre, explained that— to accelerate adoption—two clear tracks have been established within the Competence Centre of Catena-X in Spain:

• Companies that want to use Catena-X solutions: hands-on support to experiment with applications, data models, and Catena-X kits; prepare work processes aligned with standards; and validate information-exchange flows in an agile, efficient, and secure way.
• Companies that want to develop Catena-X solutions: support for providers and developers by connecting them with Tractus‑X resources, and enabling validation and interoperability testing at multiple levels.

This approach is designed to help SMEs (around 95% of companies in the sector) access the Catena-X ecosystem easily. Even when they do not interact directly with large OEMs, they still need to digitally transform their information-exchange processes to remain competitive.

Taking part in the Competence Centre of Catena-X in Spain means entering this new reality in time and with expert support: understanding the offering, testing it in a Catena-X environment, and adopting or developing solutions with guidance recognized by Catena-X to connect companies securely and reliably across the entire value chain.

Finally, the Symposium hosted the European Data Spaces Awards ceremony, which highlights European data space initiatives with real impact and emerging approaches. This year, work in manufacturing data spaces was recognized to Catena-X in the category “Excellence in end-user engagement and financial impact”, as well as SM4RTENANCE in the category “Most innovative emerging data space.”