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To verify the practical benefits of the proposed approaches, they have been evaluated in a discussion with data analysts at HYVE AG. HYVE is a German innovation and consulting company founded in 2000. Since then, they established as a leading international innovation company. The company is specialized on the identification of new fields of growth and the development of future product generations. HYVE works across industries and supports international companies as well as SMEs, political institutions or research centers in their innovation processes. Meanwhile more than 70% of the DAX companies are among HYVE’s customers (HYVE, 2018). One of the core competencies of HYVE is their market research department that focusses on the identification of technological trends and opportunities. HYVE systematically scouts for external experts, monitors international startup activities and started the exploitation of various data sources such as patent databases and social media. Two main topics were discussed: First, the usefulness and applicability of crowdfunding as a data source for technology foresight and indicator for future opportunities and trends. Second, the potential benefits of the specific methods presented in this study.

Crowdfunding as a data source for technology foresight

During the discussion, it turned out that HYVE experts already considered the use of crowdfunding as a data source for analyzing technological activities and emerging trends. In accordance with the propositions made in this thesis, HYVE experts see valuable potential in the special characteristics and principles of crowdfunding. They argue that crowdfunding is the best known indicator for market reactions as consumers invest real money on the presented products. Therefore, HYVE experts share the opinion that crowdfunding platforms can be considered as ‘markets before the mass market’ and might constitute a relevant, efficient and promising source for foresight activities. Moreover, crowdfunding platforms offer early feedback mechanisms for inventors, who first present their ideas to the market and then produce products in case their campaigns have been successful. Therefore, the platforms can be an interesting source for new innovative ideas and idea generation.

HYVE recently started to analyze crowdfunding data in external consulting applications. They examined for example emerging fields of smart home technologies, such as smart security or smart lightning and compared the different investment and success rates.

On the other hand, also limitations of crowdfunding analysis have been discussed. The types and the number of different product categories on crowdfunding platforms is limited. Therefore, the analysis can only be used for some technologic fields. Moreover, generalizability has to be questioned. It is to some extent unclear whether crowdfunding investors are early adopters, which would be a very interesting market group, or rather hobbyists and gadget lovers who are only interested in very specific niche products and constitute a questionable indicator for general market demand. Furthermore, the success of crowdfunding campaigns is not only based on the underlying technological idea, but also on various additional factors, such as marketing skills of the campaign creators.

To obtain detailed views of the technologic landscape, HYVE suggests to monitor and systematically explore all types of social media platforms, to which also crowdfunding can be counted. Social media mining offers a very powerful source to explore and verify innovations and ideas. In terms of generalizability, the analysis of Facebook is a relevant data source in Germany, while Twitter is rather limited as it is mainly used by journalists and media professionals. Particularly interesting is the analysis of web blogs and specific internet forums, which are valuable and representative sources to examine consumer needs in several branches.

Potential benefits of the proposed text mining methods

HYVE distinguishes between two main perspectives to monitor and analyze technologic developments, the telescopic and the microscopic perspective. While the telescopic perspective strives to examine general trends and developments in the technologic landscapes, the microscopic view focusses on the detailed examination of a specific technological field. Also the tools presented in this thesis can be classified into these two perspectives. The keyword emergence, market portfolio and technology risk map provide an overview of the general development of the technologic landscape, emerging technologies, trends and potential opportunities. This information is especially interesting for research centers, political institutions or companies that are interested in various technologies. HYVE and HYVE’s business clients are particularly interested in microscopic perspectives and the detailed examination of a specific technology. For these purposes, the market hype curve and co-word networks are highly suitable. The approach of the market hype curve raised interest as it constitutes a dynamic analysis, incorporating the development of the occurrence

outliers. Since the results are sometimes based on relatively small quantities, single crowdfunding campaigns might have a distorting effect on the overall visualized development of a technology. On the other hand, it might be particularly interesting to take a closer look at the projects and innovations that were responsible for these peaks. Also co-word networks are considered to be a relevant method to show the relations between technologies, products and application fields. Especially the linkages between technologies and possible markets/application fields are interesting in order to discover future innovation opportunities.