Big Data in Entrepreneurship

Introduction

This is the era of big data. Digital technology has transformed the connection and greatly increased the engagement between enterprises and users, as it gives users access to shop online and interact on social media (Li & Zhang, 2021). Users are no longer merely passively accepting products or services, but getting deeply involved in product or service innovation. Further, using digital technology, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data technology, to collect, store, and analyze massive data provides great convenience for enterprises to accurately forecast user demands and market trends (Ardito et al., 2018b; Gauzelin & Bentz, 2017). Big data is playing an unprecedented role in the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem (Cappa et al., 2021).

Obviously, big data is rapidly affecting many industries, such as traditional manufacturing, retail services, and finance, and thereby changing the competitive landscape of enterprises in these industries (Li et al., 2018). Enterprises may establish data analysis departments or seek external data analysis services to utilize big data. Enterprises with strong data analysis capabilities are establishing core competitive advantages (Hajli et al., 2020), thus improving their market share and competitive position (Ghasemaghaei & Calic, 2020). As Tabesh et al. (2019) pointed out, powerful big data technologies help enterprises extract information from big data and, ultimately, turn it into a business opportunity. In this sense, enterprises should implement big data strategies to better utilize data resources.

Entrepreneurship research is paying increasing attention to big data. However, the research on big data in entrepreneurship remains fragmented (Ardito et al., 2018a). Previous research has analyzed the process of data management (Zeng & Glaister, 2018), the antecedents of big data adoption (Maroufkhani et al., 2020; Verma & Bhattacharyy, 2017), the application of big data in product innovation, strategic decision-making, business model innovation, and other entrepreneurial activities (Ghasemaghaei & Calic, 2020; Mikalef et al., 2019; Tabesh et al., 2019; Wiener et al., 2020). For example, Huang et al. (2017) pointed out that enterprises use big data analysis to construct, hedge, and monitor, market opportunities, and thus effectively reduce the uncertainty in new business development. Amit and Han (2017) stated that the application of big data technology reduces the cost and time of testing and verifying entrepreneurial ideas, thereby promoting enterprises to identify opportunities. In sum, big data is especially important for early-stage enterprises (Olanrewaju et al., 2020).