The impact of Big Data on the business performance of Swedish-based companies

Abstract

Big Data has the power to transform entire business processes and improve current business activities. Many organizations seem to understand the benefits that Big Data can offer to their business, especially its meaningful potential business value but they find several difficulties in adopting it, mainly because they are struggling in finding ways of exploiting the derived insights to improve their business. New Product and Service Development are two very important business processes that have been proven to hold a considerable role on the viability of an organization and if these insights are capitalized, they can offer additional business opportunities. New data-driven and customer centered products as well as services can be developed offering a sustainable competitive advantage and new revenues streams to organizations aiming for an improved lifestyle to the society. This paper attempts to conceptualize and explore the impacts of Big Data in the business performance, due to its high strategic potential and it also explores if and how Big Data and its related technologies are leveraged in the processes of New Product and Service Development. A qualitative study acts on combining prior Big Data studies with diverse Swedish-based firms from various industries that utilize Big Data aiming to explore and compare key essential features of Big Data especially with regards to its effect on business performance and its utilization in the New Product and Service Development. Furthermore, this research uses the grounded theory. Empirical findings show that the companies which have implemented a data-driven strategy in their operations, are able to see a positive dependence of Big Data to their business performance, while the companies that have not established a data-driven mindset yet in the whole organization, try to tackle the challenge of lack of understanding of how to utilize Big Data technologies to create potential value and accomplish their business goals. Other crucial factors that affect the implementation of a data-driven strategy is the quality of collected data, availability of data, legal aspects of the data privacy and security and highly skilled personnel working with Big Data. Therefore, companies ought to think and make strategic decisions using a holistic view about Big Data integrating their employees, processes and technologies into their operations to achieve effectiveness and efficiency.