Neelie Kroes delivers 2010 Guglielmo Marconi lecture at the Lisbon Council

The 2011 Digital Agenda Summit convened under the timely theme of New Sources of Growth and Innovation. Delivering The 2011 Guglielmo Marconi Lecture, the Lisbon Council’s annual flagship lecture on innovation, Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission and commissioner for the Digital Agenda, vowed to encourage the development and deepening of Europe’s digital economy in the coming decade. Prof. Nigel Shadbolt, chair of midata, described this new UK policy initiative which allows consumers to access, control and use data currently held about them; Alexander Alvaro, vice-chair of the committee on budgets and member of the committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs at the European Parliament, and Peter Hustinx, European data protection supervisor, discussed the dilemma regulators face as they grapple with the challenges of an entirely new industry; Matthew Key, chairman and CEO of Telefónica Digital, and Hervé le Jouan, founder and CEO of Privowny, France, explored the potential of the Digital Agenda from a company perspective. And Taylor Reynolds, senior economist for information society at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), discussed the economics of personal data.