Content analysis of open innovation communities using latent semantic indexing

Abstract

Open innovation (OI) represents an emergent paradigm by which customers and users are involved as part of the innovation processes of organisations. One of its most popular implementation schemes is OI communities, which have been popularised by the use of social software. Through these communities, users are free to post, share, comment and evaluate other users' ideas, and they can interact with other users as well as with the innovation department and experts of the organisation. One of the challenges of OI communities is distinguishing the most innovative ideas, as they receive hundreds or even thousands of ideas. This paper proposes a novel approach for this task consisting of analysing the content of shared ideas. Through this analysis, several conclusions about the decision processes of the organisation can be inferred. The obtained results can help OI managers to improve ideas evaluation processes.

Keywords:

• open innovation
• innovation communities
• latent semantic indexing
• ultrametric trees
• innovation policies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

M.R. Martínez-Torres is an Associate Professor in Management and Business Administration at Business Administration and Marketing Department, University of Seville. Her main research interests include intellectual capital and knowledge management, and social network analysis. She has co-authored articles in many leading academic and professional journals, including Information and Management, IEEE Transactions on Education, Computers & Education, and Behaviour and Information Technology.

ORCID

M.R. Martínez-Torres http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1640-0020

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consejería de Economía, Innovación, Ciencia y Empleo under the Research Project with reference P12-SEJ-328, and by the Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad under the Research Project with reference ECO2013-43856-R.