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

Carlo Bottai, Lisa Crosato, Josep Domenech, Marco Guerzoni and Caterina Liberati

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2024, vol. 207, issue C

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Unconventional data; SMEs; Innovation; Corporate websites; HTML tags (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 Q55 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:207:y:2024:i:c:s0040162524003950

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123597

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