Using web content analysis to create innovation indicators—What do we really measure?

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.