What If Compliance Wasn’t a Burden – But an Enabler?

As Europe moves towards a future shaped by Digital Product Passports (DPPs), manufacturers face a fundamental question: how can increasingly complex compliance requirements become manageable, scalable and trustworthy?

On 24 June 2026, we officially launched COMPLIANCE4DPP with our Kick-Off Meeting — a new Horizon Europe project bringing together 19 partners from nine countries to address exactly this challenge.

From compliance burden to business enabler

Compliance is often seen as a complex box-ticking exercise: necessary, time-consuming and difficult to navigate, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises.

But what if compliance could happen automatically?

And what if businesses could participate in trusted data ecosystems without having to navigate a maze of technical standards, regulatory requirements and data-sharing complexities?

This is the vision behind COMPLIANCE4DPP.

The project aims to bring together technologies and approaches that can make compliance an integrated part of digital product data ecosystems. By combining Gaia-X data spaces, Digital Product Passports and open-source “Compliance Definition as Code” technologies, COMPLIANCE4DPP is working towards an ecosystem where trust, transparency and regulatory compliance are built in from the start — rather than added as an afterthought.

Making trusted data sharing work in practice

Digital Product Passports have the potential to transform how product information is created, shared and used across value chains. But for this potential to become reality, businesses need solutions that are not only technically capable, but also practical and accessible.

COMPLIANCE4DPP focuses on making complex compliance requirements easier to manage and automate while enabling companies — including SMEs — to participate in trusted data ecosystems.

The goal is not simply to comply with regulation. It is to create the foundations for more efficient, transparent and connected European value chains.

Beyond compliance

The impact of COMPLIANCE4DPP goes far beyond meeting regulatory requirements. By making trusted data sharing easier and compliance more manageable, the project aims to support European industry in:

• accelerating the green and digital transition;
• strengthening circular value chains;
• improving transparency and trust across supply chains;
• reducing the complexity of regulatory compliance;
• enabling SMEs to participate in emerging data ecosystems; and
• unlocking new opportunities for innovation and business models.

In this way, compliance can become more than a requirement. It can become an enabler for change.

The journey starts now

With the Kick-Off Meeting on 24 June, the COMPLIANCE4DPP consortium officially began its three-year journey.

A huge thank you to all 19 consortium partners, experts and stakeholders joining us in this effort. Their expertise, perspectives and collaboration will be essential in turning this vision into practical solutions.

Over the next three years, we look forward to exploring new ideas, building strong collaborations and demonstrating how compliance, trusted data and digital product information can work together in practice.

Because the future of compliance should not be about doing more paperwork.

It should be about enabling European industry to do more.