Tracking on Attention to the Emotion and Sensibility and its Application at the Innovative Companies: Focused on Content Analysis of Annual Reports

Abstract

This research aims to identify innovative companies' attention to the emotion and sensibility and its application by analyzing the contents of the corporate annual reports. Annual report is a good reference data because it describes not only various current products and services' annual activities and business performance but also corporate future direction. Sensibility is interpreted and used with various words internationally: various related terms such as sensibility, sense, emotion, feeling and affection are analyzed not only by the definition but also the interrelationship among them, and included for the contents analysis. To select the innovative companies, the researcher used ‘Fast company’ that is the economic journal and deducted the companies list via ‘The world’s 50 most innovative companies’ in 2009 and 2014. Listed companies' 2009 and 2014 annual reports' contents were analyzed to identify the rate of the recognition and the application of sensibility to their business. Even though the quantitative result of the content analysis indicates not a strong relationship between corporate innovativeness and 'sensibility' qualitative result identifies companies are paying more attention to the 'sense' and ‘feeling’ during five years. In conclusion, the innovation that company pursues strategically is shifting from differentiation and the technological leadership to satisfying user experiences and the number of companies which express and measure user feeling and emotions are increasing.