Can websites reveal a firm’s innovativeness? Empirical evidence on Italian manufacturing SMEs

Research in innovation usually builds on conventional data such as balance sheets, surveys, patents, or product catalogs. This paper intends to explore unconventional data, specifically web-scraped data, as an information source for innovation studies, proposing a careful procedure to establish the veracity of the linkage between web-based data and firm-level information retrieved from conventional sources. The study regards a sample of Italian manufacturing small and medium enterprises active in 2016, comprehending both innovative and non-innovative firms. It is based on HTML tags, whilst most of the previous literature worked on the web-pages text and related semantics. Our paper provides evidence that the way HTML language is applied to build a corporate website unveils the capabilities of the owner firm, helping to distinguish innovative from non-innovative SMEs.