Big Data as a Strategic Asset:Competitive Advantage, Business Model Transformation,and Managerial Intelligence in Chinese Enterprises
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65166/mnn2n380Keywords:
big data analytics capabilities, competitive advantage, business model innovation, organizational decision-making, data governance, digital transformation strategy, Chinese enterprise contextAbstract
The strategic significance of big data has become a defining feature of contemporary management discourse, yet the conditions under which big data capabilities translate into sustained competitive advantage remain incompletely understood — particularly in emerging-market contexts where institutional dynamics, platform ecosystem dominance, and regulatory complexity co-determine competitive behavior at the firm level. This paper addresses that gap through a structured thematic review of peer-reviewed literature encompassing 38 studies across five analytically distinct thematic domains: big data as a strategic resource, big data and business model transformation, big data in organizational decision-making and managerial intelligence, implementation barriers and organizational challenges, and data governance at the policy-strategy interface. The Chinese enterprise context serves as the primary analytical frame, treated not as a generic emerging-market setting but as an institutionally distinctive environment shaped by state-directed digital infrastructure, platform conglomerate dominance, and a rapidly evolving data regulatory architecture. The synthesis produces three core findings. First, big data capability generates competitive value only through organizational mediators — dynamic capabilities, learning, governance, and culture — not through technology investment alone, establishing a consistent and strategically consequential gap between infrastructure capacity and realized competitive returns. Second, competitive advantage in China's data economy operates through three distinct pathways — capability reconfiguration, business model transformation, and decision intelligence — each requiring different organizational conditions and carrying different strategic risks. Third, China's institutional environment, including its data sovereignty regulation and state industrial policy, is an active co-determinant of enterprise-level competitive behavior rather than a background condition. The paper contributes an integrated strategic framework for understanding big data as a management phenomenon, advances a substantively grounded account of the Chinese enterprise context, and generates practitioner-relevant recommendations for enterprise strategists, policymakers, and management educators navigating the competitive imperatives of the data economy.
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