The amount of data in our world has been exploding. Companies capture trillions of bytes of information about their customers, suppliers, and operations, and millions of networked sensors are being embedded in the physical world in devices such as mobile phones and automobiles, sensing, creating, and communicating data. Multimedia and individuals with smartphones and on social network sites will continue to fuel exponential growth. Big data—large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every sector and function of the global economy. Like other essential factors of production such as hard assets and human capital, it is increasingly the case that much of modern economic activity, innovation, and growth simply couldn’t take place without data.

The question is what this phenomenon means. Is the proliferation of data simply evidence of an increasingly intrusive world? Or can big data play a useful economic role? While most research into big data thus far has focused on the question of its volume, our study makes the case that the business and economic possibilities of big data and its wider implications are important issues that business leaders and policy makers must tackle. To inform the debate, this study examines the potential value that big data can create for organizations and sectors of the economy and seeks to illustrate and quantify that value. We also explore what leaders of organizations and policy makers need to do to capture it.