Using web content analysis to create innovation indicators—What do we really measure?

Abstract

This study explores the use of web content analysis to build innovation indicators from the complete texts of 79 corporate websites of Canadian nanotechnology and advanced materials firms. Indicators of four core concepts (R&D, IP protection, collaboration and external financing) of the innovation process were built using keywords frequency analysis. These web-based indicators were validated using several indicators built from a classic questionnaire-based survey with the following methods: correlation analysis, Multi-Traits Multi-Methods (MTMM) matrices and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results suggest that formative indices built with the questionnaire and web-based indicators measure the same concept, which is not the case when considering the items from the questionnaire separately. Web-based indicators can act either as complements to direct measures or as substitutes for broader measures, notably the importance of R&D and the importance of IP protection, which are normally measured using conventional methods such as government administrative data or questionnaire-based surveys.

5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2023)

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Productivity, Digital Footprint and Sustainability in the Textile and Clothing Industry

“…Company websites are a valuable source of information that reflects a company's behavior and identity. Analyzing website content can provide insights into a company's market orientation, innovative behavior, and survival rates (Axenbeck and Breithaupt, 2021;Heroux-Vaillancourt et al, 2020;. Technological advancements have enabled the automation of website analysis through web crawling and web scraping techniques, which can extract data from websites and convert it into structured data suitable for analysis (Kumar et al, 2017;Diouf et al, 2019).…”

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