A section of the Observatory monitoring activity is dedicated to innovative Micro-Small-Medium enterprises using data from corporate websites. The study activity focuses on exploring the differences between innovative and non-innovative enterprises, both from an economic perspective and in terms of web-based information. The identification of the typical web characteristics of innovative enterprises allows for building innovativeness maps at a micro level.

The first experiments, as well as the subsequent analyses on large samples of companies, are described below.

Scraping Innovativeness From Corporate Websites: Empirical Evidence on Italian Manufacturing SMEs

Commonly used data sources in innovation studies suffer from well-known limitations, particularly with respect to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The paper shows how the HTML code of SME websites is a useful data source that could help to correct these problems. In particular, we exploit HTML tags to empirically demonstrate that the websites of innovative Italian SMEs are different from those of non-innovative SMEs both in terms of size and coding practices.
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Can websites reveal a firm’s innovativeness? Empirical evidence on Italian manufacturing SMEs

Using a sample of 858 Italian SMEs, the paper shows that companies registered as Innovative SMEs or Startups at the Italian Business Register (Laws 221/2012 and 33/2015) can be distinguished from other SMEs based on the HTML tags used to code their web pages. Corporate websites are therefore an information source to be taken into account in the study of innovative SMEs.
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Unconventional data for policy: Using Big Data for detecting Italian innovative SMEs

The paper contributes to the scientific debate on the use of web information in Economics with a threefold contribution. First, while most of the literature has focused on the linguistic content of web pages, we use HTML tags, i.e. the computer code that describes the functioning of the web page. Second, we propose a method to evaluate the quality of the matching between web addresses and companies’ balance sheets. Third, we show that data retrieved from corporate websites can help identify innovative SMEs.
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