Motivation/principles

The team behind the “Economy of Things” strategic advanced engineering project at Bosch Research is working on building blocks and solution concepts for digital sovereignty in Europe. The researchers are convinced that by establishing suitably organized marketplaces, along with payment and incentive systems, based on European values, Europe’s diversity and individuality will be leveraged as strengths to provide an efficient and globally competitive basis for a European digital economy.

In June 2020, GAIA-X, the initiative for establishing a high-performance, competitive, secure, and trustworthy cloud and data infrastructure for Europe, entered its extended project phase. Bosch has two roles to play in GAIA-X as it stands today. Firstly, it uses the digital infrastructure to develop innovations in the fields of industry, buildings and mobility. Secondly, Bosch contributes precisely the kind of technological expertise GAIA-X needs to establish trust in a sovereign data economy. This includes distributed ledger technologies (DLT), multi-party computation (MPC) and decentralized identity management (e.g. self-sovereign identity (SSI)). “Our vision is to create digital marketplaces that are built on the foundations of fairness and neutral competitive conditions. This is precisely what we are working on in the ‘Economy of Things’ strategic advance engineering project at Bosch Research,” explains project director Nik Scharmann. “The principles we have worked out for platforms fit perfectly with GAIA-X, so we are very involved in the project.”

The Bundesverband Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien e.V. (the German industry association for information technology, telecommunications, and new media) – Bitkom for short – has published a paper presenting real-life application scenarios involving self-sovereign identity (SSI) that have already reached a very advanced stage of implementation. In simple terms, SSI means that users manage their digital identity themselves, without relying on a central identity provider. This is also a matter of crucial importance for the “Economy of Things” (EoT) research team, a strategic advance engineering project at Bosch Research. In its article, Bitkom clearly outlines the advantages of companies sharing, validating, and updating master data and supplier certificates automatically in line with the SSI principle.