EAGER: The Web of Innovation: Using Website Data to Understand How Firms Innovate

American Institutes For Research In The Behavioral Sciences, Arlington VA

Investigators

Abstract

Firms are viewed as the central drivers of commercializing new technologies through value capture in the marketplace. How firms approach this process of innovation is relatively diverse and can be thought of as a function of several factors, including technology specialization and know-how, market receptivity, desire and ability to course-correct on strategic and tactical considerations, and access to alliances and networks. This research investigates the utility of website data to examine the innovative behaviors of high-tech, small firms in three substantive domains: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and sustainable energy. Using small firms as the unit of analysis allows for higher order inferences to be made at the level of the industry, technology regime, and broader innovation system. This research provides a better understand of how knowledge turns into valued products and services that support national economic growth and results in a more complete understanding of the innovation ecosystem and appropriate add another much-needed data source and set of methods to the toolkits of social science researchers trying to understand technological progress. This project harvests, analyzes, and reports on website data and evaluates its utility as a data source for understanding the innovation process. This work structures key variables from firm websites and operationalizes them as determinants and descriptors of firm innovation behavior. This research builds on an exploratory framework to apply computer science methods to the study of innovation, and as a result, crosses two disciplinary tracts that usually do not intersect with one another in great depth. As such, the project employs clustering and classification algorithms to operationalize key variables, thereby quantifying each firm?s market and technology orientation based on its online representation. Selected outcomes are validated against several data sources including enterprise databases, targeted interviews, and extant firm surveys.