Martin Obschonka (QUT) and international colleagues wondered if big data can reveal economic outcomes and processes. To find out they analysed 1.5bn tweets by 5.25m tweeters in the US, to see if they could identify clusters of people with entrepreneurial characteristics.

They could, albeit with qualifications. Their analysis identified entrepreneurial energy in counties in Silicon Valley, southern California, mid-Atlantic cities, Denver and Florida, although tweet-analysis under and overestimated start-up cultures in a range of second-tier centres. Overall however, “the regional distribution of the entrepreneurial profile is very similar to regional distributions across U.S. regions when measured with self-report questionnaires.”
Interesting enough, but what makes this a big deal indeed is their approach’s potential; “prior research had to rely on hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people that filled out personality tests for research purposes, our study indicates that one can achieve similar results when ‘simply’ analysing publicly available social media data by using artificial intelligence methods and a big data approach.