Guiding questions — Business model#

Fork notice. The questions below are reproduced from the iSHARE Data Space Template page Business model → Guiding questions — © iSHARE Foundation, used under the EUTwinLink Consortium Agreement (see Legal notices). The template's question text is carried over unchanged so this fork stays comparable to its upstream.

Everything between the LDT answer markers is the EUTwinLink instantiation — that is what partners fill in. Decisions already taken live on the block page: Business model.

Building block B1 · owner(s) ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026 · block status DRAFTED · see the Building-block register.

Answer provenance. Every answer below is tagged with where it comes from, because a governance scheme that cannot be traced is not a governance scheme:

Decided — already fixed by the Grant Agreement, the Consortium Agreement or a recorded decision elsewhere in this scheme. Change it only through the change procedure.

Proposed — a defensible default, derived from the iSHARE Trust Framework, the DSSC Blueprint and the decisions this scheme has already taken. Drafted for the owner to confirm, correct or reject at TIPS. It is not an agreed position until TIPS approves it.

Needs owner — cannot be answered without the named owner: a fact about their systems, their legal position or their commercial intent. The text states what is needed and why.

Open points across the whole scheme are collected in Open questions for partners.

Purpose of this Building Block Component: A clear business model defines who benefits, how value is created, and how operations are sustained over time.This means clarifying:

1. Value propositions for different roles (e.g. data providers, users, CO₂ consultants, real estate owners)#

How effectively are value propositions tailored to different participant roles in the data space
How do participants experience or perceive the benefits of interacting with other participants
How actively are participants engaged, and what initiatives motivate their participation?
How can engagement be increased for participants that are less active or less involved

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Proposed The LDT has four materially different participant types, and averaging them into one proposition is the fastest way to lose three of them:

Role	What it gets	What it gives
Cities (Cartagena, Almelo)	evidence for policy that an isolated twin cannot produce; cross-site benchmarking; a replicable LEZ/PED playbook	municipal data under controlled tiers; political exposure
Operational twins (Aruba, Hamburg)	efficiency gains; a trust framework they did not have to build; proof the scheme travels beyond the EU	operational data under confidentiality tiers
Service providers (Nunsys, LogiNex, HyEnSys, iLabs)	a market with pre-cleared identity and licensing, so each deal costs less to close	platform and methodology investment
Citizens & communities	visible air-quality and energy outcomes; control over their own data through Commons; rewards for behaviour change	movement and household data — the most sensitive in the scheme

Proposed Perception and engagement: the only honest measurement the LDT has today is participation itself, and it is poor — 0 of 125 answer slots filled by the v0.5 deadline. The engagement instruments (Aegean's co-creation work, the observer chatbot, the token rewards) target citizens, while the group that is actually disengaged is the partners. Worth saying out loud in the exploitation analysis.

Needs owner ERTICO + iSHARE (input Nunsys, Aegean) — the open 🧩. This table is a drafting position derived from the use-case profiles, not a validated value proposition.

2. Revenue mechanisms (e.g. subscription, pay-per-use, public-private funding)#

How can multiple revenue streams be explored while ensuring fair access for all participants?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Decided During the pilot there is no revenue: operations are funded by the EUTwinLink budget with every partner co-financing at least 50% of its own costs.

Proposed Candidate post-M18 streams, with the fairness constraint attached to each — because the scheme has municipalities, SMEs and citizens in it, and a mechanism that prices any of them out defeats the purpose:

Stream	Fairness constraint
Membership fee for the scheme layer	tiered by organisation size; free for citizens and community bodies; Observers free
Transaction fee on the Marketplace of the EU LDT Toolbox (Nunsys)	charged on commercial-tier exchange only; open- and restricted-tier exchange never charged
Tokenisation / reward services	commercial; must not become a condition for participating in the data space
Public funding (follow-on projects, municipal budgets)	the realistic carrier for the trust layer, which no one wants to pay for directly
Certification	iSHARE Foundation's own scheme, not LDT revenue

Proposed The structural point for PD4: the trust layer is the part nobody will voluntarily fund and every other stream depends on. Combining streams works only if one of them cross-subsidises it.

Needs owner ERTICO + iSHARE: align with the PD5 cost-benefit analysis; none of these rates exist.

3. Cost structures including data curation, onboarding, governance participation#

Which operational costs can be optimized without affecting trust or data quality?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Proposed The scheme's cost base after the pilot, roughly in order of size:

Satellite and registry (iSHARE Foundation) — admission, Participant Credentials and the iSHARE Participant Registry, the scheme's only authoritative trust anchor. Continuous, unavoidable, and the thing everything else depends on; carried as part of iSHARE's standing scheme operations rather than as a pilot cost (PD4 v1.0 §2 Table 1, §3 and §6).
Issuance per credential type (accredited issuers) — each issuer operates its own service, or uses issuance infrastructure provided by iLabs as technical operator while remaining the issuer of record, and publishes its own status list.
Interoperability layer (iLabs) — ITB-S conformance lab, development sandbox and reference trust gateway, financed per the revenue model in Intermediaries & operators. ITB-S testing is per-participant at onboarding, plus re-testing on every release.
Marketplace of the EU LDT Toolbox — Nunsys hosts and operates the Marketplace of the EU LDT Toolbox for the duration of the project. At project completion, responsibility for the Marketplace and its assets, services and results is proposed to transfer to CitiVERSE EDIC or another entity designated by the Contracting Authority, so that a single EU LDT Marketplace serves the wider ecosystem (to be agreed with the Contracting Authority). (PD4 v1.0 §6.)
Governance — TIPS secretariat, change handling, WP4-lead equivalent. Currently funded as project effort and with no post-pilot home.
Data curation — borne at each site for its own data, not centrally.

Proposed What can be optimised without damaging trust or quality: automation of the mechanical steps (registry entry, credential issuance, policy checks are already automatic by design), shared ITB-S test profiles so each new participant is not a bespoke engagement, and reuse of iSHARE open-source components rather than bespoke builds.

What cannot be optimised away, and PD4 should say so: ITB-S conformance before production, and the governance function. Removing either saves money by removing the reason participants trust the scheme.

Needs owner iLabs and Nunsys: actual running costs. No figures exist anywhere in this scheme.

4. Cost structures including data curation, onboarding, governance participation#

How can business models better support participants’ individual goals and motivations?
Which mechanisms encourage shared objectives and collaboration?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

(The template repeats this heading; these are its second set of questions, about participants' own goals and collaboration.)

Proposed The business model supports participants' individual goals only if it lets them take different things from the data space without forcing a common objective. In the LDT the goals genuinely diverge: Cartagena needs defensible evidence for a contested LEZ policy; Almelo Energie needs its community to retain control of household data; FHC needs commercial confidentiality; Nunsys and LogiNex need a market. The scheme accommodates this through tiering and use-case layers — a baseline everyone accepts, with stricter local rules where a participant's own goal requires them.

Proposed Mechanisms that encourage shared objectives rather than merely tolerating divergence:

Cross-site benchmarking — the one thing no participant can produce alone, and therefore the strongest reason to stay in.
Derived-indicator publication rights — a licensing pattern that lets sites compare without re-sharing raw data, so collaboration does not require surrendering control.
Replication playbooks — Cartagena's LEZ and Aadorp's PED are worth more to each city if others reuse them.
Shared cost of the trust layer — each participant would pay more for identity and policy infrastructure alone than together.

Needs owner ERTICO + Aegean: whether partners recognise these as their incentives.

5. Theme & Scope#

What is the data space’s thematic scope?
What are its objectives, growth, and profit ambitions?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Decided Thematic scope: the Local Digital Twin network — interconnecting Local Digital Twins across city and operational domains (urban environment and mobility, energy districts, airport operations, port logistics), with a marketplace and an AI agent layer on top. The scheme covers data-space participation for those twins; it does not cover the twins' internal workings.

Decided Objectives to M18 are the project's: interconnect four twins under one trust framework, deliver PD4 as the governance scheme, stand up the marketplace, and demonstrate replication.

Proposed Growth and profit ambition, stated plainly: the LDT's ambition is replication, not scale. Its value proposition is that a city or site can adopt a working pattern — LEZ evidence, PED operation, non-EU participation — rather than that the network grows large. Profit ambition at scheme level is none; at service level it belongs to the service providers.

That distinction matters for PD4 chapter 8, because replication and scale imply different sustainability models: replication needs a documented, transferable playbook, while scale needs an operator with capacity. The LDT is resourced for the first.

Needs owner ERTICO + iSHARE: confirm, or correct, if the exploitation plan assumes network growth.

6. Use cases & Services#

Which use cases are strategic priorities vs future ambition?
What benefits do these use cases offer participants?
What services are core vs value-added?
Who will deliver them?
How are they incentivised?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Decided Six use cases, all elaborated as use-case profiles: Cartagena LEZ/air/heat, Almelo/Aadorp PED, Aruba Airport, Hamburg Port, marketplace & CO₂ tokenisation, AI agents & observers.

Proposed Strategic priority versus future ambition:

Strategic now — Cartagena and Almelo. They are the funded city twins, they carry the citizen-data questions that drive the hardest scheme requirements (Commons controls, aggregation floors), and PD4 depends on them.
Strategic now, different reason — Aruba. It is the scheme's only test of non-EU participation, and that question cannot be deferred because it is already live.
Ramp-up — the marketplace (WP6, M9+), on which the sustainability case depends.
Future ambition — Hamburg Port (supporter, no owner confirmed) and the AI agent stack (prototype at M18).

Proposed Core versus value-added services: core is identity, trust, policy enforcement, registry, catalogue and conformance — provided by iSHARE and iLabs, non-commercial, and required for the data space to exist. Value-added is analytics, simulation, tokenisation, engagement tooling and the observer chatbot — delivered by Nunsys, LogiNex, HyEnSys and Aegean, commercial, and optional.

Incentives: core is funded; value-added providers are incentivised by their own market. The weakness is that core has no post-M18 funding, which is question 2's problem.

7. Governance Authority#

What are the responsibilities and business model of the authority
How is governance reviewed and improved?

LDT answer DRAFTED · owner: ERTICO + iSHARE (input: Nunsys, University of the Aegean) · due 26 Sep 2026

Decided Responsibilities of the governance authority are set out in Organisational form & governance authority: the TIPS Committee approves the scheme and its changes, the Steering Committee handles escalation, and iSHARE Foundation is Scheme Owner and custodian. During the pilot the authority has no business model of its own — it is project effort, carried by WP4.

Proposed That is precisely the gap PD4 chapter 8 has to close. A governance authority with no funding model after M18 is the single largest threat to the scheme's continuity, larger than any technical dependency, because every other function can be transferred to another operator while governance cannot be transferred to nobody. Candidate answers: fold LDT governance into iSHARE scheme governance with a LDT-specific council (the default option in the block page), or fund a secretariat from membership fees — each with consequences for who controls the rules.

Proposed Governance is reviewed and improved through the change procedure, with the structures themselves reviewed at the TIPS following each implemented change (Co-creation & change management).

Needs owner ERTICO + iSHARE: the funding model for the authority itself. Nothing in this scheme answers it today.