Using online textual data, principal component analysis and artificial neural networks to study business and innovation practices in technology-driven firms

In this paper we introduce a method that combines principal component analysis, correlation analysis, K-means clustering and self organizing maps for the quantitative semantic analysis of textual data focusing on the relationship between firms’ co-creation activities, the perception of their innovation and the articulation of the attributes of their product-enabled services. Principal component analysis was used to identify the components of firms’ value co-creation activities and service value attributes; correlation analysis was used to examine the relationship between the degree of involvement in specific co-creation activities, the online articulation of firms’ service value attributes and the perception of their innovativeness. K-means and self organizing map (SOM) are used to cluster firms with regards to their involvement in co-creation and new service development, and, additionally, as complementary tools for studying the relationship between co-creation and new service development. The results show that, first, there is a statistically significant relationship between firms’ degree of involvement in co-creation activities and the degree of articulation of their service value attributes; second, the relationship should be considered within the context of firms’ innovation activities; third, OS Software-driven firms are the best example in terms of co-creation and new product-enabled service development, i.e. the collaborative principles built in their customer participation platforms should be adopted by other (non-software) firms interested in enhancing their innovation capacity through involvement in co-creation and new product-enabled service development. 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (G. di Tollo), [email protected] (S. Tanev), [email protected] (G. Liotta), [email protected] (D. De March).