Big Data in the Innovation Process - A Bibliometric Analysis

Big Data is widely used in a growing number of business processes to open up new spaces for optimizing, improving and adapting the decision making to the changing environment. Businesses and universities are forced by the competition to engage various and, until recently external, elements in their internal innovation efforts. Examples of such openness of the innovation process and innovation practices are the involvement of customers, students, competitors, living laboratories, external collaborators and often external data. Data plays a crucial role in innovation development. Big data has the ability to open up the innovation process of enterprises and to link the developed innovations with knowledge, information and lessons learned from many external sources. This study introduces a bibliometric analysis of the application of Big Data in the innovation process to analyse the current research on the topic. The analysis scrutinizingly examines the science literature by: keyword analysis, word and trend analysis, coupling clustering, source and authors' review to reveal the path of the research development in the field and to provide insight to innovation management professionals and scholars.