Business-Centred, Data-Centred, or User-Centred? A Perspective on the Role of Designerly Approaches to User Centricity in Big Data Innovation

Digital innovation is of growing importance for manufacturing companies, potentially disrupting entire industries. Particularly the use of big data offers new grounds for innovation in product-service-systems. However, digital innovation poses challenges to incumbent companies on how innovations are created. With an abundance of technological possibilities, potential business challenges, and novel use cases, companies struggle to find the right approach to digital innovation. This conceptual paper builds on a study of big data innovation that proposes to either start with a data or business perspective in the ideation phase (Vanauer et al. 2015) and reflects these approaches with a user innovation perspective, suggesting that the changing role of users and customers in digital innovation may allow for a third, user-centred approach. While a data-centred approach starts with key resources, a business-centred approach starts with organisational goals that need to be fulfilled (Vanauer et al. 2015). Although both approaches may be suitable to lead to innovation, a user-centred approach may help to build big data innovation based on current and future user needs. While some studies criticized that a focus on users may lead to incremental innovation, this may be due to how users are involved. This study explores how designerly approaches such as service design and design thinking may be utilized for innovation of product-service-systems in the context of big data innovation. Based on these concepts, I formulate four propositions for future empirical and theoretical consideration.