INTRODUCTION: BIG DATA GOES BOOM

We produce vast amounts of data in our daily life. Worldwide, we send 144 billion emails daily. Every second, we post 700 Facebook updates, write 600 tweets and initiate 35,000 Google searches. We transact $6.5 trillion yearly on Visa cards. These activities—plus texting, checking-in, pinning, Instagraming, signing-in, making mobile payments—all create a digital by-product. Data is superabundant. Figuring out how to extract value from all the digital exhaust is driving the current big data boom: a corporate-sponsored, frenzied and competitive race to gather and mine our personal data.

Data analysts use the term “big data” to convey the enormity and complexity of our digital output. For them, the data is very big indeed—and expanding. Ninety percent of all data created in history has been created in just the past two years. Worldwide storage is expected to increase from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016. It is difficult to even translate what this metric means, but according to a 2010 Economist article, one zettabyte is equivalent to all the information in existence that year. One zettabyte would take something like eleven billion years to download using today’s broadband (Franks, 2012 p. 89). Big Data is, in fact, immense.

Analysts look at this immense aggregation of bytes, and see an unwieldy data set unlike anything they’ve crunched or made sense of before. Our data already exceeds current storage capacity, and of that vast amount of data, only about five percent is structured. Yet, despite the difficulty of harnessing its value, many are convinced that big data will become the world’s most important resource; the fuel for the next economy. In a 2011 report, the World Economic Forum declared our personal data a “new asset class” equivalent to oil and money in potential economic importance:

“Personal data will be the new ‘oil’ of the 21st century… It will emerge as a new asset class, and a person’s data will be equivalent to their ‘money’. It will reside in an account to be controlled, managed, exchanged and accounted for, just like banking services operate today.”

Conferences about big data are now being held all over the world, from Minsk to Malta. Chief Information Officers are regularly joining the executive suite and one HBR article even proclaimed the job of data scientist to be the sexiest of the 21st century. Merely the promise of personal data’s potential value has sparked the current boom. As Tricia Wang writes, “Big data can have enormous appeal. Who wants to be thought of as a small thinker when there is an opportunity to go BIG?”

As the hype grows, nearly every company wants a part of big data, but this gold rush potentially obscures much of the real value of personal data. First of all, it often fetishizes the data (and the data scientist), positioning it as the prize itself rather than the enabler of possibilities. Next, it can misplace the business opportunity: only a few companies have the capacity and resources to analyse data at this large scale. Lastly it risks forgetting the most fundamental rule of innovation – start with the person. We already know that successful product, service and experience innovation starts with an understanding of real people and their real needs, so why has this basic principle been largely absent from the obsession with big data?

This paper draws on research that looked to discover new value in the data boom through a global investigation of people’s experiences with and the new emerging business opportunities around personal data. It proposes a new perspective on personal data— one that shifts our attention away from what is technically possible and tantalisingly profitable to focus first on what people need.

We are not alone in calling for a more human-based approach to the big data discussion. However, we are advocating a people-centred perspective that runs deeper than simply putting data tools and privacy into people’s own hands (cp. Green 2012). We also want to move the discussion further than arguing for a more qualitative approach to the data itself (although this is an important point raised by others: see Crawford 2012, Rasmussen and Madsbjerg 2013, Wang 2013). Instead, our key point is that in the midst of a data boom, it is also imperative for businesses to think about how they can use the personal data to provide value back to the individuals who are both its source and consumer. This paper argues that the best opportunity in the emerging personal data economy may not be the mining, processing and selling of data. Rather, there is equal opportunity to discover the benefits that data can provide directly to customers and to deliver that value back through compelling services that address their specific needs, desires and frustrations.

METHODS: A PEOPLE-CENTRED APPROACH TO THE PERSONAL DATA ECONOMY

In 2012, at Claro Partners, we conducted a six month global consortium project investigating the emerging “Personal Data Economy”. It began with the observation that personal data is fundamentally changing the way we work, live and play. Data is the output but, more importantly, it’s also the input of a digitally-networked society. We could see a shift in everyday behaviour, noticing how people use personal data to make everyday decisions on things like what to eat, where to go, and how to get there. We saw new products and services, from the fitness tracker Fitbit and social app Highlight, to the adaptable thermostat Nest and the new banking interface Simple, transforming the way in which people interact with their data – and the value they receive from it. We call the collection of services that enable these new experiences the “Personal Data Economy” or PDE. The PDE is not built by solely mining data; instead it is built by using data as another resource in the creation of services that are valuable to people and delivered through experiences they want. Meaning, the PDE is an emerging economy of services, outside of data aggregation and targeted advertising, which focuses instead on meeting people’s needs in new ways. We believe it provides business opportunities as big as, or greater than big data.

In partnership with three international clients from the banking, telecom and technology sectors, our team interviewed more than sixty individuals, experts and start-ups in cities around the world, including San Francisco, London, Berlin, Tokyo, São Paulo, New York and Boston. Our research was grounded in the belief that in order to understand how to create value from personal data, we need to start with the person, rather than the data. So, instead of looking at data to try and understand what it might tell us about human behaviour, we started by looking into human behaviour to see what it could tell us about the role of data in people’s everyday lives.

We designed the research around human stories relevant to each location. For example, we talked with members of the flourishing Quantified Self (QS) movement in San Francisco. This is a community of “self-quantifiers” who track, share and make use of their personal data, with the intention of changing their own or others’ behaviour. They track a variety of behaviours around finance, health, diet, life planning, mood and mental acuity, in pursuit of new forms of self- and human knowledge. For them, data is like a sixth sense. In London, we interviewed urbanites to gain insight into how they use digital technologies and connected devices to engage with and navigate their city, both physically and emotionally. We observed how they use and create real-time data to orient themselves to their surroundings, fulfil immediate needs, participate in their community and to make decisions about things like utilities, transportation, health, shopping, public services and entertainment choices. We wanted to better understand these experiences. In Berlin, we explored data unrest, going from hacker dens to parliament to discuss digital rights with people who have political ideas and investment in personal data, including members of the Pirate Party. In Tokyo, we focused on NFC technology-enabled experiences and in São Paulo, on social networks and self-made business opportunities. All of these stories offered unique insights into the new experiences and behaviours emerging around personal data. In total, we conducted thirty-one 1:1 interviews.

In our research, we also interviewed twelve start-ups who are defining new offers built on personal data. For example, we met with the creator of Chromaroma (a game built on top of London Transport data and played by thousands of commuters), Kitakore (a Japanese recommendation engine), Gravity Eight (a site for collecting a broad variety of self-tracking information), and other start-ups looking to create entertainment, recommendation, tracking, discovery or other types of services built on top of personal data. Lastly, we met with twenty experts like Wired’s Ben Hammersley, Urbanscale’s Adam Greenfield, and MIT’s Sandy Pentland to discuss the role of personal data in disrupting both business and society.

Our interviews were more than mere conversations. We used collaging, follow-alongs, workshops, participant observation and other creative means to engage, be shown and told, and dig deep into people’s data-driven experiences. Below are some of the insights and patterns we synthesized.