IP Strategy in the Age of Big Data

Joren De Wachter, IP Strategist, Integrating Technology, IP & business models

Joren de Wachter invites In-House Counsel to re-model their IP strategy based on the inevitable growth of “Big Data”. He argues that businesses which allow free access to data are more likely to succeed than those restricting access. His IP analysis includes trade secrets, patents and algorithms. “Big Data” is the revolution happening around us in the creation, collection, communication and use of digital data. In the last couple of years, humanity’s capacity to create data, to communicate and to process them, has increased manifold. According to IBM, we produced 2.5 Exabyte (that’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.5x1018 bytes) of data every day in 2012. But the total amount of data, already beyond easy intuitive grasp, is not the key characteristic of Big Data. Its key characteristic is the continued exponential growth of those data. While 90% of all data in existence today was created in the last two years (which means that, in less than 18 months, we create more data than has been created since the beginning of humanity, roughly 150,000 years ago), the most important point is this: those 90% created in the last two years, that what we consider to be enormous amounts of data today, will be dwarfed into complete insignificance in a couple of years’ time.