Innovation and SDGs through Social Media Analysis: Messages from FinTech Firms

José Nicanor Franco-Riquelme,Luis Rubalcaba

doi:10.3390/joitmc7030165

Abstract

Financial technology-based firms (FinTech) are crucial to promoting new technologies and advances in innovations related to the financial field, sustainable development, and financial inclusion. This paper aims to assess the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and open innovation integrated within the public discourse in the social media of FinTech firms, using machine-learning-based social media analysis (SMA). Accordingly, we tracked the behavior of 21 firms based on the empirical material of 32,716 posts on Twitter. The outcomes showed dissimilar discourses based on FinTech firms’ activities. However, it was found that only financial infrastructure, lending, and personal finance fields have a discourse related to innovation and, to a lesser extent, related to the SDGs thematic. Thus, awareness of sustainable objectives is still far from being a relevant issue for FinTech, which, in general, has neglected to significantly mention SDGs; nonetheless, innovation and related terms are a consistent topic in this area. Furthermore, hints of the implementation of the open innovation paradigm and interest in novel technologies are demonstrated, in addition to the promotion of different actors and events on social media that serve as a showcase for firms that have a presence on Twitter.

Highlights

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) include an extensive scale of services that are mainly involved in the business-to-business domain
The implementation of the proposed methodology to the Twitter database allowed us to compare and obtain insights on FinTech firms’ discourse, showing perceptions of how they communicate with their clients, and the highlighted topics based on their type of activity, including the terms that they use more frequently
Based on their discourse in social media, it can be deduced that FinTech firms are not fully involved in the global awareness of innovation and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Summary

Introduction

Knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) include an extensive scale of services that are mainly involved in the business-to-business domain. A recent literature review conducted by Olanrewaju et al [22] highlights the importance of social media usage for the digital business development process, either for marketing, information search, business networking, or crowdfunding They noted two research gaps that this study aims to address: (i) to examine how SMA and collective interaction features stimulate innovation; and (ii) to identify how these implicit or explicit interactions differ among different type of FinTech firms. Identified the use of different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques (i.e., basic text mining, information extraction, sentiment analysis, semantic similarity, topic modeling, linguistic and word count, machine learning, text analytics, and web data scraping) as key data science methods that are applied to digital business research They note these approaches may require special data storage, accessibility, and processing due to the nature of the vast quantity of information generated by Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and web pages, and the complexity of the algorithms used

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion