Profesor Roberto V. Zicari (@odbmsorg), from the Goethe University  in Frankfurt recently gave a talk at Stanford on Big Data: http://ee380.stanford.edu

This is a very original presentation where bigdata is viewed from an European perspective: Big data a Data driven society

It contains information on the projects around  data driven innovation  from the European Commission.

If you are interested, this is the page with a link to download the presentation: http://www.odbms.org/2014/07/big-data-a-data-driven-society/

and you can watch the video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBhu2kkZXGQ