Profiting from the Data Economy: Understanding the Roles of Consumers, Innovators and Regulators in a Data-Driven World

1. Beyond Big Data

While there has been a lot of discussion around the term “Big Data,” much of the discourse treats this as an abstract idea rather than a system in which we are all active participants. While the term has become ubiquitous, interest in the topic has not waned. A Google search for the term turns up approximately 13.7 million search results. A snapshot of Google Trends reveals the meteoric rise of queries for Big Data beginning in 2011 and increasing ever since then.¹ Searching archived Twitter messages using Topsy reveals more than three million tweets referencing Big Data and in excess of two million tweets mentioning #bigdata.

Some contend that this marks a dramatic shift in what businesses and organizations are capable of ...