Disciplined autonomy: How business analytics complements customer involvement for digital innovation

• Published in: The journal of strategic information systems 2022-03, Vol.31 (1), p.101706, Article 101706
• Main Authors: Shi, Yunfei, Cui, Tingru, Liu, Fang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: BA value realization; Big Data; Business analytics; Business analytics culture; Business analytics skills; Complementarity; Consumer electronics; Customer involvement; Digital innovation; Information systems; Innovations; Technological change
• ISSN: 0963-8687; 1873-1198
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jsis.2022.101706

•BA complements customer involvement to achieve disciplined autonomy for innovation.•BA skills-complemented mechanism offers global guidance via a top-down process.•BA culture-complemented mechanism empowers local autonomy via a bottom-up process.•BA culture is stronger in complementing customer involvement than BA skills do.•BA skills are necessary but insufficient for digital innovation. The rise of big data and the fluid boundaries of digital products are driving companies to use business analytics (BA) to power their customer involvement. The complementarity view offers unique competence to generate value from BA because capability complementarity is less likely to be replicated or imitated. Unlike prior studies on BA-enabled value realization, our research investigates the interactions of BA and customer involvement capabilities using the complementarity view. We tested our model using data collected from 317 IT companies in China. Our results suggest that BA value realization requires both a top-down mechanism in which BA skills provide global guidance for alignment with a company’s goals and a bottom-up mechanism in which BA culture empowers local autonomy for adaptation to ever-changing needs. Our BA-complemented mechanisms provide research and practice with a way to concurrently use BA and customer involvement capabilities to address the duality of digital innovation. We further suggest that BA skills are necessary but insufficient for digital innovation because BA culture demonstrates a stronger effect in complementing organizations’ existing capabilities than BA skills do.