Big Data can help streamline a company’s production or improve our welfare services. But we cannot make the most of Big Data until we have learned to harness the vast amount of information. This is the conclusion of a new international White Paper based on input from 130 researchers, business professionals and governmental officials. The paper has been sent to the European Commission. The initiators hope that their call-to-action will give rise to new research and funding activities.

When you use your credit card you produce data about what you have bought, where and when. Google uses your online searches to forecast when and where the next flu epidemic will occur. Big Data is created constantly and everywhere, and by exploiting this knowledge about our whereabouts and behaviour, private and public organisations can optimise their production and services.

But according to Professor Børge Obel, who is centre director of Aarhus University's Interdisciplinary Centre for Organizational Architecture (ICOA), we must learn to process and handle all of these intangible data before we can profit properly.

"Big Data holds countless opportunities as well as liabilities. We need more research on relevant issues in order to learn to exploit Big Data properly with the right legislation and regulation," says Børge Obel, who is one of the initiators of a new comprehensive report, Unleashing the Potential of Big Data. The White Paper was developed by the research centre ICOA at Aarhus University in collaboration with Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, IBM and the Organizational Design Community.

The White Paper is the product of the World Summit on Big data and Organization Design, which was held at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris in May 2013. The participants were representatives of the business community, government representatives and the world’s leading researchers on Big Data.

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