Big Data, Public Participation, Sustainable Innovation and the Pullip Doll

Petteri Repo

Big Data, Public Participation, Sustainable Innovation and the Pullip Doll

Big data involves enormous, highly complex and unstructured data sets. It tracks activities and collects logs, often in real time. So when you change from one television channel to another, your activity may be saved on a server and potentially be combined with equally minute activities from others.

Are you then participating in public discourse and for the common good? Perhaps you are more than you think.

Big data bears great promises for sustainable innovation as it brings together people in completely new ways. No longer will you need to be active, form opinions on complex and distant issues, and communicate them to policy makers. Companies – often big ones – will do this for you.

Today big data relates to online marketing, but tomorrow it could optimize your energy consumption, reduce the amount of waste you produce and maybe, just maybe, even make living on this planet sustainable. That would constitute a very sound sustainable innovation policy.

Does this sound both liberating and frightening? Perhaps so, but it surely is apt to bring new opportunities for sustainable innovation. The catch is that we need new ways to approach people. It is not only about people’s data, it’s also about their competences, aspirations and communities.

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