FROM INCUBATORS TO ECOSYSTEMS: EVALUATING THE STARTUP DIGITAL ECONOMY CLUSTER OF HULL CITY

I DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD BUT I BELIEVE IN DATA

By doing an emerging coding process with data I found different issues with information regarding 86 of companies indexed by Duedil. Issues such as companies not actually located in Hull being listed as so, inactive companies that haven’t been removed from the database or companies that have been being wrongly assigned to a category that does not quite adjust to their main activity. There are also a large number of “ghost” companies that are untraceable online. Nathan and Rosso in their research ‘Measuring Digital Economy in the Uk’ (2013) already pointed out issues regarding lack of accurate information from databases. According to the authors, "SIC-based definitions of the digital economy miss out a large number of companies in business
and domestic software, architectural activities, engineering, and engineering-related scientific and technical consulting, among another sector" (2013:4). To sum up, organizational researchers must be aware of the fact that “we may not have an exact picture of the number of businesses in the information economy or its employment, or the value it brings to the UK economy” (in Nathan and Rosso, 2013:3), especially in the startup context. Despite the overwhelming data inaccuracies, reliance on data, “including, in particular, the use of so-called ‘big data’” is one of the key features of the digital economy” (OECD, 2014:84).

Some authors have already brought into attention how urgently data needs to be challenged (Crawford et al, 2014). However, to cultivate a critical awareness of the fact that big data do not tell any story per se, and that algorithms are not inherently neutral” (Noble, 2016; Kraemer et al., 2010) is not yet a generalized matter of urgency or relevance, especially for a sector of the community that keeps blindly believing that, on the one hand data do not lie, and on the other hand, everything data-ish is big data. In fact, even if “the relentless progress has brought us massive social networking platforms along with massive data” it is not that often used. Big data is real-time social media data, for instance, with billions of nodes. The real “big data”, as the authors of the manual on ‘Social Network analysis for startups’ kindly advise, is too big for relational (SQL) databases, and the present research is being operated in the realm of small data (Tsvetovat and Kouznetsov,2011:138).

 

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