A Novel Perspective on Innovating with Data

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Abstract
Information systems research often discusses innovation that is data-driven or made possible by data. The data are assumed to represent relevant facts about organizational reality and to be available from internal or external sources. Yet, despite the seemingly self-propelling datafication of socioeconomic life, the relevant ways of encoding reality in data do not come into existence by themselves—all data are human-made matter that could have been otherwise or not existed at all. Recent studies have examined the production, sourcing, use, and reuse of data, but even this literature remains silent on how data are designed in practice. To start addressing this blind spot in our understanding of data, we propose data innovation lens to studying the creation of new valuable ways to render phenomena into data. We argue and illustrate using a case vignette of improved gender identity data that the ways in which data-producing arrangements are set up, modified, or expanded to produce a type of data can amount to innovation. The lens to data allows to study data as innovation and how such innovation can enhance organizational capacity to intervene in internal and external environment through, for instance, data analytics and algorithmic decision making based on data.