A Media-based Innovation Indicator: Examining declining Technological Innovation Systems

Abstract

The recently introduced technological innovation system (TIS) life cycle allows analyzing the decline of mature technologies. This study complements the associated empirical indicators by proposing a novel text-based innovation output indicator based on the media's role in forming collective expectations. We process more than 15,000 English news articles to capture the media's reporting on technological improvements of the internal combustion engine (ICE). Our results depict an increasing number of innovation articles with positive sentiment until 2015. More recently, we observe a decrease in innovation articles. Along with the decreasing ICE sales and performance data, this weakening support of the media for the TIS innovation output suggests a possible misalignment with collective expectations that could lead to a vicious decline cycle. Our study offers a real-time indicator for monitoring innovation strategies and develops a methodological framework to derive technology-specific innovation indicators on the firm-level using unsupervised topic modelling and sentiment analysis.