The Monthly Big Picture is a PESTLE analysis to give you a snapshot of WAI social network landscape over the last month. Today we take a look at Politics & Economics (part 1 of 3).

Politics – Fifty shades of innovation policies from Europe to the US

The OECD released an updated review of the French innovation policy, highlighting the need to “encourage private sector innovation, make public research more accountable and channel more funds into most promising R&D projects”. An interesting view in the midst of France’s social crisis after records rates of unemployment now reaching over 5 million French citizens. You can find the updated review using following link. The same month Brookings Institute held a webinar to discuss top innovation policy in the US, going through “the right to be forgotten, internet governance, copyright & IP, patent reform”, opening the debate on how innovation policy opens or restricts innovation. You can find a summary here. Those analyses outline how typically different cultural and social backgrounds affect innovation policies and demands that are complex to align, both on a national and global basis.

Economics – The relativity of the API rise

McKinsey published an interesting insight on how companies generate revenues from APIs. According to the consulting firm, “a small but growing proportion of app revenues comes from organisations making their data available through APIs”. They outline the business models enabling API related revenues, showing 43% of organisations are currently using a safe pay per use model. While business models are maturing, there is still a need to properly lead privacy discussions, as shown in the above section. This insight can be contrasted by another trend around Big Data, made available by Forbes, suggesting that only 10% of leaders would follow their “gut-feeling” for decision making, and among the rest of them, “nine out of ten executives would ignore the data if it disagreed with their intuition”. Although most of these leaders would re-analyse data to figure out some sort of compromise between gut feeling and analysis, it shows we are still far from being able to fully drive strategies based on metrics and their API counterpart.

Society and Technology parts will follow shortly. Stay tuned!