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, multitraits multimethods (MTMM) matrices, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The 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.
Highlights
The majority of researchers in innovation and technology management today still rely on public databases and questionnaire-based surveys to obtain most of their data to perform quantitative studies on industrial strategies and innovation activities
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
We used web content analysis to build innovation indicators from the web text content of four factors that are consequential for the success of high-technology innovation, research & development (R&D), intellectual property (IP), collaboration, and external financing
Summary
The majority of researchers in innovation and technology management today still rely on public databases and questionnaire-based surveys to obtain most of their data to perform quantitative studies on industrial strategies and innovation activities. Oversolicitation of respondents and of their time militates against questionnaire-based surveys, which suffer from increasingly lower response rates (less than 10%) and threaten the validity of studies performed using such methods, for instance because of the potential for significant nonresponse biases. The information provided on company websites is as rich as it is diversified, including products, services, business models, R&D activities, and more.
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