The impact of hard and soft components of big data analytics capabilities on entrepreneurial orientation

Big data analytics capability (BDAC) is considered an aggregation of various types of firm-level resources. While BDAC’s impact on firm performance is well established in the literature, its effect on entrepreneurial orientation is an emerging area of research. This study first categorizes several BDAC resources into soft and hard components. Then, it examines whether these two big data components impact a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation differently across its three dimensions: proactiveness, innovativeness, and risk-taking. This study further investigates the extent to which proactive social media market orientation mediates the relationship between BDAC and the enactment of entrepreneurial orientation. Based on data from 253 British firms, the findings from combined PLS-SEM and fsQCA analyses offer broad support for a contextual view of the value of big data for entrepreneurship in the social media-induced digital era, thereby making a significant theoretical and practical contribution to the field of information systems.