In this full technical report we describe the background, data, method and findings of our analysis of the link between data activity and business performance.

Key Findings

• Using data has a positive impact on the business bottom line
• Businesses that use their data more intensively are 8% more productive
• Businesses that perform deeper analyses of their data see a boost in profits of £3,180 per employee.
• Businesses that empower employees to act on their data benefit from this data four times as much as those that don’t

Big data has been touted as a vital resource for business but until now there has been little hard evidence of data’s positive impact on the bottom line.

In this report, we review the literature, and describe the data sources and estimation approach for our econometric analysis of the link between data activity and business performance in a sample of 500 UK companies that are active online.

We also present the full results of this analysis, and our robustness tests (for a summary of our findings, see the briefing paper).

Authors
Hasan Bakhshi, Albert Bravo-Biosca and Juan Mateos-Garcia