A business intelligence approach using web search tools and online data reduction techniques to examine the value of product-enabled services

This article summarizes the results of an empirical study focusing on the value of product-enabled services in intensive R&D spenders. The focus is on product-driven firms for which new service development is expected to be particularly promising but also quite challenging. Part of the motivation is based on the fact that existing studies on the value attributes of hybrid offerings are mostly conceptual and need to be further substantiated through more systematic empirical studies. The research includes two samples with a total of 83 product-driven firms selected among the top R&D spenders in Canada and Europe. It adopts an innovative methodology based on online textual data that could be implemented in advanced business intelligence tools aiming at the facilitation of innovation, marketing and business decision making. Combinations of keywords referring to different aspects of service value were designed and used in a web search resulting in the frequency of their use on companies’ websites. Principal component analysis was applied to identify distinctive groups of keyword combinations that were interpreted in terms of specific service value attributes. Finally, the firms were classified by means of K-means cluster analysis in order to identify the firms with a high degree of articulation of their service value attributes. This work articulates a relatively simple and intuitive method for quantitative and qualitative semantic analysis of online textual data that is similar to latent semantic analysis but could be used as part of more user-friendly expert system solutions and business intelligence tools based on easily accessible business statistics packages. The results show that the main service value attributes of the Canadian firms are: better service effectiveness, higher market share, higher service quality, and customer satisfaction. The service value attributes for the European firms include, among others, product added-value, product modernization and optimization of customer time and efforts. Canadian firms focus on collaboration and co-creation with suppliers and customers for the sake of product–service innovation as a competitive advantage on the marketplace. On the other hand, the focus of EU firms on innovative hybrid offerings is not explicitly related to business differentiation and competitiveness. 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.