Big Data and Knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship: trends and opportunities in the tourism sector.

Abstract

The paper focuses on the growing relevance of Big Data as valuable source of knowledge impacting on the creation and execution of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship. Starting from the comprehension of the innovative and knowledge-intensive attributes of the entrepreneurship, as driver for the competitiveness of the organizations in the scenario of the knowledge economy, the study aims to deepen which are the opportunities offered by Big Data within an entrepreneurial process. Big data represent an actual field of study, both for the agenda of researchers and practioners, but while a growing set of works are concentrated on the comprehension of the technological dimensions of the phenomenon, its application in the field of entrepreneurship is still in infancy. Focusing on this last endeavor, the paper aims to provide an interdisciplinary contribution at the debate on big data by demonstrating how the large amount of knowledge distributed in the web and mainly around the social network platforms can allow the conception of an entrepreneurial process more aligned with the customers’ needs and focused on the actual market’s trends. Based on a qualitative review of an interdisciplinary literature, the paper will provide empirical evidences on the applications of Big Data for the effective realization of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in the field of the tourism.