Scraping innovativeness from corporate websites: Empirical evidence on Italian manufacturing SMEs

[EN] Research in innovation studies usually relies on financial statements, surveys, or patents as primary data sources, although these sources of information show some limitations when applied to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Our paper explores whether the HTML code of a company¿s website is...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Bottai, Carlo, Crosato, Lisa, Guerzoni, Marco, Liberati, Caterina, Domenech, Josep|||0000-0002-7302-5810
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/220272
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/220272
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Unconventional data
SMEs
Innovation
Corporate websites
HTML tags
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] Research in innovation studies usually relies on financial statements, surveys, or patents as primary data sources, although these sources of information show some limitations when applied to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Our paper explores whether the HTML code of a company¿s website is a further source to better inform innovation policies, under the assumption that how HTML is employed in crafting a corporate website provides insights into the company¿s innovation capabilities. In particular, we leverage HTML tags and their associations to empirically show that the websites of innovative SMEs are different from non-innovative ones both in terms of their size and coding practices. Our findings, based on a sample of Italian companies, indicate that the features of the HTML code of corporate websites reflect unobservable characteristics related to the skills and creativity present in businesses.