Validation of a web mining technique to measure innovation in the Canadian nanotechnology-related community

In this exploratory study, we explore a methodology using a web mining technique to source data in order to analyse innovation and commercialisation processes in Canadian nanotechnology firms. 79 websites have been extracted and analysed based on keywords related to 4 core concepts (R&D, intellectual property, collaboration and external financing) especially important for the commercialisation of nanotechnology. To validate our methodology, we compare our web mining results with those from a classic questionnaire-based survey. Our results show a correlation between the indicators from the two methods of r=0.306 (p-value=0.007) for R&D, of r=0.368 (p-value=0.002) for IP, of r=0.222 (p-value of 0.071) for Collaboration and of r=0.222 (p-value=0.067) for external financing. We conclude that some of the data extracted by our web mining technique can be used as proxy for specific variables obtained from more classical methods.