Value creation in emerging technologies through text mining: the case of blockchain

Abstract

As technology progresses, organisations must understand where to direct their value-creating efforts to achieve or sustain competitive advantage. This is even more true in the case of emerging technologies, where innovative activities often focus on achieving a technology promise while overlooking a set of technological, operational, organisational and user-related problems that must be overcome before the technology can fulfil this promise. Through an innovative application of text-mining, this paper develops a practical methodology to identify a range of problems related to a technological field in an unsupervised manner, that may benefit firms, researchers and policymakers. We apply the methodology to the field of blockchain and compare it to traditional literature reviews.