211 https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctecno.2022.specialissue9.209-235
3C Tecnología. Glosas de innovación aplicadas a la pyme. ISSN: 2254 – 4143 Edición Especial Special Issue Febrero 2022
1. INTRODUCTION
The contemporary time period is considered as the age of big data as newer data is being
produced at an unprecedented rate, from all organizations, industrial sectors as well as public
organizations and bodies (Mikalef, Boura, Lekakos, & Krogstie, 2019). The exponential
growth in the volume of data has resulted in big data being considered as the key source
of competitive advantage, business performance and innovation (Chaudhary, Pandey, &
Pandey, 2015; Grover, Chiang, Liang, & Zhang, 2018; Jelinek & Bergey, 2013; Mikalef et al.,
2019; Shahzad, Xiu, & Shahbaz, 2017). At present, over 3.2 billion people, of the world’s
population are connected onto the internet with 46% of them being connected through the
usage of smart phones (Clement, 2020). Furthermore, this massive shift of IP trac (web
trac, ow of data across the internet) from xed networks to wireless based networks is
likely to lead to a number of challenges for organizations. It is forecasted that global mobile
data trac from 2017-2022 (in exabytes per month) is from 11.51-77.49 (Clement, 2020).
By 2050 these gure are likely to be 95% of world population (Khan, Khan, Alam, & Ali,
2018). According to one estimate, the amount of global digital healthcare data will grow to
25,000 petabytes in 2020, from 500 petabytes in 2012 (Gardner, 2013).
Organizations are required to analyse, in a meaningful manner, structured as well as
unstructured data in order to obtain deeper insights into customer related behaviour, their
service usage as well as interests on a real-time basis (Mikalef et al., 2019; Riaz, Alam, & Ali,
2017) to enhance business performance, competitive advantage and innovation. Due to the
rapid increase of data volume, variety, velocity and veracity, considerable developments have
taken place and have also been documented, relating to such technologies and techniques
which involve the analysis, visualization as well as storage, of data (Mikalef et al., 2019).
Many organizations of dierent sizes are searching for ways with the aim of improving
their performance, innovation and business value, by extensive usage of big data analytics
(BDA) tools (Mikalef et al., 2019; Shinwari & Sharma, 2018; Yin & Kaynak, 2015). The
pharmaceutical industry is essentially dened by innovation (Petrova, 2014).
The prevalence of big data and the usage of the same can result in enhancement in
innovative performances, which then leads to further improvement in economic development
(Douglas, 2012; Shahzad et al., 2017). In other words, innovation, which can be termed