The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the largest repository of information in the world, providing a data stream that grows at the same time as the scope of the Internet does in society. As with most Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), its digital nature makes it easy for computer programs to analyze it and discover information. This is why it is being increas­ingly explored as a source of new indicators of technology, economics and development. Web-based indicators can be made available on a real-time basis, unlike delayed official data releases. In this paper, we examine the viability of monitoring firm export orientation from automatically retrieved web variables. Our focus on exports is consistent with the role of internationalization in economic development. To evaluate our approach, we first checked to what extent web variables are capable of predicting firm export orientation. Once these new variables are validated, their automated re­trieval is assessed by comparing the predictive performance of two nowcast models: one considering the manually retrieved web variables, the other considering the automatically retrieved ones. Our results evidence that i) web-based variables are good predictors for firm export orientation, and ii) the process of extracting and analyzing such variables can be entirely automated with no significant loss of performance. This way, it is possible to nowcast not only the export orientation of a firm, but also of an economic sector or of a region.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent changes in corporate websites reflect firms’ survival. Since keeping a website online involves some costs, it is likely that firms would invest resources on it only when they are active and healthy. Therefore, when a firm dies, this event is likely to be manifested on its website as lacking updates or being down. Design/methodology/approach: Changes in the corporate websites of a panel of Spanish firms were tracked between 2008 and 2014 in order to evaluate the approach. The status of websites, classified according to the type of change undergone, was used to infer firms’ activity status (active or inactive). Multi-period logistic regressions and a duration model were applied to study the relationship among the website status and the firm’s status. Findings: Results showed that changes in website contents clearly reflect the firm’s status. Active firms were mainly associated with updated corporate websites, while inactive firms were more associated with down websites. In fact, results confirmed that the firms’ death hazard increases when the website activity lowers. Originality/value: Although online information is increasingly being used to monitor the economy, this is the first study to connect online data to firms’ survival. The results revealed a new source of information about business demography and evidenced corporate websites as a fresh source of high granularity business data.

Public policies have encouraged the proliferation of technology platforms that support the transition towards sustainable agriculture and the development of innovations in the food system. Provided the difficulty associated with assessing the outputs and outcomes of technology platforms, this work proposes a practical assessment method based on the retrieval and analysis of online documents related to the technology platforms. Concretely, the method consists of applying web scraping techniques to retrieve documents related to a technology platform from the Internet and then applying web data-mining techniques to automatically classify these documents into the functions that the platform should fulfill, which are described from the viewpoint of co-evolution of innovation. Data are automatically processed to obtain a variety of metrics, which are applied to measure the impact of European Technology Platforms (ETPs) on promoting an organic food paradigm. This method provides time-series data that helps to follow the evolution of the different functions of the platform and to describe its lifecycle. It has been applied to one platform taken as a case study, TP Organics, which represents a key platform for stakeholders that promote organic farming and agroecology as core components of an ambitious program for sustainable agriculture. The obtained online-based measures have been proven to assess the global evolution of the platform, its dissemination through the European Union (EU) Member States, and the evolution of the different functions expected to be fulfilled by it regarding the diffusion and promotion of innovations in organic agriculture.