Defining definition: a Text mining Approach to Define Innovative Technological Fields
This addresses the challenge of scope definition for project managers in technology-intensive innovation, though it appears incremental as it applies existing text mining methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of defining the scope of innovative technological projects by proposing a text mining tool that uses Scopus abstracts to automatically delineate technological fields, applied to case studies like Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, showing it provides crucial information such as definitions and related elements.
One of the first task of an innovative project is delineating the scope of the project itself or of the product/service to be developed. A wrong scope definition can determine (in the worst case) project failure. A good scope definition become even more relevant in technological intensive innovation projects, nowadays characterized by a highly dynamic multidisciplinary, turbulent and uncertain environment. In these cases, the boundaries of the project are not easily detectable and it is difficult to decide what it is in-scope and out-of-scope. The present work proposes a tool for the scope delineation process, that automatically define an innovative technological field or a new technology. The tool is based on Text Mining algorithm that exploits Elsevier's Scopus abstracts in order to the extract relevant data to define a technological scope. The automatic definition tool is then applied on four case studies: Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. The results show how the tool can provide many crucial information in the definition process of a technological field. In particular for the target technological field (or technology), it provides the definition and other elements related to the target.