European Companies Need Big Data, Too

Many Europeans lament the fact that the United States has outpaced Europe when it comes to the global Internet economy, writes Paul MacDonnell in the Wall Street Journal. But recent advances in data analytics, which uses large sets of data to identify correlations between variables and to make predictions about future events, are revolutionizing everything from cancer research to wildfire management. It’s the perfect opportunity for European companies to take the lead, not because Europe is incubating startups to take on Google and Facebook, but because some of its best-established industries are well-suited for the data-analytics era. They only need European regulators to get out of the way.