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Konstantinos Stylianou - EU Competition Law Database Development - IAA Case Study

Dr Konstantinos Stylianou used his Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) funding to create and deliver a publicly accessible database of EU competition law decisions and distribute findings of his ongoing research.

Securing funding to share results 

‘Around three years ago, my colleague, Marios Iacovides, and I received funding from the Swedish Competition Authority for a research project in European Commission case law,’ Konstantinos explains. ‘Yet it soon became very clear the work we’d been doing would be useful to other people researching the same field. We needed a way to turn our findings into something that could be accessed by the public.’

‘We secured further funding, but it was limited,’ he adds. ‘We knew our ambitious work would need a greater pot of money, so Professor Adam Crawford, the previous Director of LSSI, told us about the IAA funding. We work with a lot of external partners, so we needed Adam’s help and guidance through our application. After applying to the Responsive Mode stream in May 2021, we received the funds in July and began the project in September that same year.’

Developing a database to distribute knowledge

With the IAA funding, Konstantinos and his colleague wanted to deliver a tool to make EU competition law decisions easily accessible to the public. ‘Competition law reaches all sectors of the economy and is designed to make sure markets work efficiently,’ he says. ‘Previously, finding the outcomes of cases was challenging, so we used the IAA funds to create a free, fully-searchable online database of European competition law decisions.’

‘These decisions are important, as the European Commission is the main enforcer of all EU competition law,’ Konstantinos continues. ‘Our work would mean that anyone who works in that area of law – from competition authorities and lawyers to academics – could use the database to find information quickly and easily.’

Using funding to deliver training

Building the database needed data science, data collection and coding expertise, so Konstantinos used the IAA funding to hire an external developer, alongside a research assistant to organise the back end of the database. Once the platform was ready, Konstantinos used the remaining IAA money to organise workshops with competition authorities around the EU, introducing the database and showing them how to use it.’

‘This training involved travelling to different competition authorities across Europe, telling them about the database and showing them how to use it,’ he says. ‘The feedback has been brilliant. One EU Commission staff member told us they’d been thinking of developing their own competition law database, but could for now rely on ours.’

Planning new research to continue the project

Konstantinos plans to keep updating the database to make sure it stays relevant for at least a decade, and continue delivering training workshops across Europe. ‘The IAA funding allowed us to collaborate with others to develop the tools and contacts we needed to get to this point. Now that we’ve identified the seven main goals of competition law and created the database, we can expand our research into new developments in the field,’ he explains.

‘This next stage of the project relies heavily on the database we’ve built with the IAA funding. With more people looking into the goals of competition law through our platform, we’ll be able to provide more conclusive evidence. We hope to have a full draft ready by the summer, and publish it at the end of 2023.’

To access the database, visit https://db-comp.eu/