Neelie Kroes' €2.5bn EU big data push - but what will it really do?

Neelie Kroes, the EU's digital agenda commissioner, wants to splash €2.5bn on a scheme to develop big data in Europe

Across a range of technology sectors, the European Union arguably trails the US and, in many respects, Asia as well.

That is why Neelie Kroes has put together a €6bn programme to channel EU taxpayers' funds to a diversity of technology research - "green" vehicles, photonics, robotics, high-performance computing, 5G wireless networks, "factories of the future" and, most recently, big data.

In the research scheme unveiled this week, Kroes claimed that a total of €2.5bn would be invested across the continent in a public-private partnership fund that will consist of grants totalling €500m from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 fund, which Kroes expects will be topped up four times over by the private-sector technology partners.

Kroes claims that big data will be fuel for the "digital economy" and that Europe is falling behind and must catch up. As she unveiled her big initiative, she tweeted, "#Bigdata is the foundation and fuel of a new economy. Offering €2.5bn to make it work for a competitive Europe", adding: "#Bigdata growing 40% a year; boosting productivity and performance by 5% or more. Time for Europe to catch up."

Kroes, who billed herself as @NeelieKroesEU in the press release, in reference to her Twitter handle, said: "Data is the motor and foundation of the future economy. Every kind of organisation needs the building blocks to boost their performance, from farm to factory, from the lab to the shop floor."

It is not the first time that Kroes has alighted on big data. In March 2013, she gave a speech to the EIT Foundation in Brussels highlighting the economic opportunity it represents. "At a time when Europe desperately needs growth, this is exactly where we should be looking to create new jobs and new opportunities," she said.

She continued: "That's why I've called data the new oil. Because it's a fuel for innovation, powering and energising our economy. Unlike oil, of course, this well won't run dry: we've only just started tapping it."

Big data, she added, could be applied to agriculture, medicine and education, and even help power so-called smart cities.

"Whatever you're trying to do these days, the answer may well lie in data. Whether you want to unlock the human genome - or open up government. Whether you're trying to predict the economic future - or decrypt a foreign website. Whether you're trying to locate a traffic jam or a Higgs boson: big data tools will be helping you," she said.

The big question is, though, whether a governing behemoth is the right organisation to drive forward technology that will largely be developed by technology companies in the private sector - when what big data is crying out for is a framework that protects individual privacy and liberty from the encroachments of technology.

In other words, organisations don't need governments to help them make rational market decisions, but they do need regulation to prevent them from overstepping the mark.

While it makes eminent sense to iron out rules across the EU to better enable people to do business across the continent, it's harder to see how throwing money at disparate research projects - in the hope that one of them will turn into a world-beating business - will help.