We all recognize that without support from the private sector, many of the public programs in the arts, health and education — which we take for granted — would not exist. That same spirit should extend to Big Data. At the height of the global financial crisis in 2009, the Global Pulse initiative (where I serve as director) was set up by the UN Secretary-General as an R&D lab to find out whether Big Data and real-time analytics could help make policymaking more agile and effective. The evidence is growing that it can.