Measuring innovation in the digital economy

This project aims to develop a consistent framework to measure innovative behaviour by firms and how these relate to shifts in demands for skills based on web data collection and big data analytics. It considers several dimensions: technology adoption, such as the use of cloud services; AI innovations and applications; business investment in data assets; and managerial/organisational capabilities.

The research employs these measures to evaluate their impact on productivity performance at both firm and industry levels and by region. The main method used is textual analysis on web scraped data, including company accounts and job vacancy platforms. There are four main strands to the measurement research:

1. Construct measures of ‘Covid readiness’ in terms of innovation, AI adoption and use of cloud services before the pandemic and how this impacted on firms’ resilience to the crisis.
2. Construct estimates of the value of data investment at the industry- and firm level, based on the analysis of information on workers with data science skills from job vacancy platforms.

Lead Researcher Mary O’Mahony (King’s College London)

Collaborators Cecilia Lasinio (Italian Statistical Institute), Francesco Venturini (University of Perugia, NIESR), Oleksii Romanko (KCL), Elodie Andrieu (KCL)