Page 414 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 4

STS2320 Bruno André R. C. et al.
the opportunity to implement the logic behind the use of alternative metrics
for evaluation under the prominent European project “Digital
Entrepreneurship Monitor,” where PwC developed and applied a methodology
for assessing technology uptake using “real-time big data” extracted from
publicly available sources (European Commission, 2018).

Research design and data collection
We selected three types of metrics commonly used in social monitoring
and listening for measuring future knowledge development:
• The number of mentions of a specific topic (i.e. number of times a
specific set of keywords assumed to define a specific topic are
mentioned online);
• The level of engagement on a specific topic (i.e. number of times an
online publication has been forwarded, shared or commented on);
• Sentiment concerning a specific topic (i.e. overall mood associated
with the context in which a specific set of keywords appears, which can
be either positive, neutral or negative).
Nevertheless, existing knowledge can only be transformed into new
knowledge when two interrelated processes take place, socialization and
combination. Socialization, allows the sharing of tacit knowledge and
combination involves the conversion of explicit knowledge into more complex
sets of explicit knowledge. The amount of socialisation and the intensity of
communication and rate of dissemination of (explicit) knowledge occurring
within a community can therefore be used as a proxy of that community’s
capacity for future knowledge creation.
In an innovative attempt to quantify these key processes for knowledge
creation, this pilot study uses the number of mentions, the level of
engagement and metrics from a sentiment analysis as representative
measures of the current, real-time knowledge socialization, communication
and dissemination within a country.
In order to collect web data, a social listening tool was required. The tool
had to be able to crawl all public web pages and public social media sites,
across the globe in a wide variety of languages.
The selected tool, the Digital Intelligence Platform, collects data from 150
million public sources and covers sources in over 180 languages. 20 countries
were selected for the pilot study based on their rankings on the Global
Knowledge Index 2017. Only data from these countries were retrieved,
extracted and analysed:

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