Research Talk Prof. Marta Stelmaszak Rosa

Data are increasingly central to innovation, yet what it means to innovate with data remains surprisingly ambiguous. Bringing research on data into conversation with innovation scholarship, I distinguish three relationships: data-driven innovation, in which data guide innovation; data-based innovation, in which data constitute the basis of what is innovated; and data-centric innovation, in which data themselves become the focal object of innovation. These distinctions suggest that we need to reconsider the role of data in digital innovation theory. Existing accounts emphasize the homogenization of data into a common digital form that enables recombination. I argue that this captures what digital data share technically while overlooking how they continue to differ in what they represent, how they are structured and related, and what they can be used to accomplish. I develop data reconfiguration as a complementary mechanism of digital innovation: innovation that occurs by changing these properties of data themselves. This perspective broadens how we understand the relationship between data and digital innovation.