The analytics paradigm in business research

The availability of data in massive collections in recent past not only has enabled data-driven decision-making, but also has created new questions that cannot be addressed effectively with the traditional statistical analysis methods. The traditional scientific research not only has prevented business scholars from working on emerging problems with big and rich data-sets, but also has resulted in irrelevant theory and questionable conclusions; mostly because the traditional method has mainly focused on modeling and analysis/explanation than on the real/practical problem and the data. We believe the lack of due attention to the analytics paradigm can to some extent be attributed to the business scholars' unfamiliarity with the analytics methods/methodologies and the type of questions it can answer. Therefore, our purpose in this paper is to illustrate how analytics, as a complement, rather than a successor, to the traditional research paradigm, can be used to address interesting emerging business research questions.