Addressing the grand challenges of poverty with data-driven creative service offerings

Abstract

Big data-driven innovation gains momentum in the developing world by tackling grand challenges and making a pronounced and lasting impact. However, research has still not answered the key question regarding the dimensions of big poverty data analytics (BPDA) capabilities for creative service offerings nor their effects on economic and social outcomes. This study fills this gap by conducting a two-phase Delphi study and two rounds of surveys focusing on a globally leading microcredit institute in a developing country. The study conceptualizes management (analytics climate, cross-functional integration), platform (technology and data), and talent (pattern spotting and market ambidexterity) capabilities as the dimensions of BPDA capability. It further investigates creative service offerings (meaningfulness and novelty) as the mediator between BPDA—new service performance (economic outcome from the firm's end) as well as BPDA—quality of life (social outcome from consumer's end). Our research advances, first, the microfoundational view of dynamic capability (DC) theory in the emerging data-driven innovation paradigm by specifically identifying the complementary and co-specialization attributes of six microfoundations (i.e., analytics climate, cross-functional integration, data, technology, pattern spotting, and ambidexterity). In addition to DC, our study extends social innovation literature by establishing the connection between the instrument (BPDA capability) and outcome view (quality of life) of social innovation to tackle grand challenges in the developing world. Finally, our study extends creativity theory by introducing creative service offerings as a mediator and highlighting its role in the novel and meaningful solutions to social problems. Overall, this study is a pioneer in conceptualizing and empirically validating a research model that uncovers the potentially complex nuances between BPDA capability-creative offerings and innovation outcomes to tackle the grand challenge of poverty. Its findings are scholarly significant and executive worthy and constitute a major advancement in extant studies regarding how creative services are developed using BPDA and their impact on the firm's profitability and consumer well-being.