Generating Big Spatial Data on Firm Innovation Activity from Text- Mined Firm Websites

Innovation is one of the major drivers of economic growth, where spatial processes of knowledge spillover play a vital role. Current practices in assessing firms’ innovation activity, including patent analysis and questionnaires, suffer from severe limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate firms’ innovation activity based on the texts on their websites. We use an automated web-scraper to harvest text from the websites, then extract semantic topics in a self-learning, generative topic-modelling approach, and finally analyse these topics using an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) method to assess each firm’s level of innovation. This procedure results in a large-scale dataset that will be used for further spatial economic analysis of the distribution of innovative firms and the processes that drive the development of innovation in firms.

Kinne, Jan and Bernd Resch (2018), Generating Big Spatial Data on Firm Innovation Activity from Text- Mined Firm Websites, GI_Forum 1 , 82-89