Abstracts Business

Planning a data strategy for a startup company

by Tiia Wallin

In both business and society, data and its use are one of the most urgent issues of the day. Data is one of the most valuable assets for companies, but it has to be strategically gathered and used to benefit from it. Thus every company nowadays requires a data strategy. The research question of the thesis aims to find out what data would be the most useful in a product launch for a startup company creating a C2C platform, and how the gathered data could be used most effectively. This thesis consists of two parts: a literature review and a case study. The literature review provides a general idea of a data strategy as a concept, how it is studied in both academic and practical research, and how to create a data strategy for an organization. Based on the knowledge provided by the literature review, a case study is conducted. The case study is commissioned by a small IT startup company, and it creates an actionable short-term data strategy plan for a single business issue, with a focus on the time after the initial product launch and during the Proof of Concept phase. The plan will be used in the company to create a data strategy after the release of the thesis to gather and use relevant data for business and product improvements before launching into a new market area.