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This study investigates competitive intelligence (CI)-related practices in companies, including process, scope and organizational structure. As these aspects have not been sufficiently discussed in the literature, the study objective is to determine (1) the type of CI process being employed, (2) whether the CI scope is limited to competitor analysis or spans a broader business environment and (3) whether the CI process and scope vary depending on organizational CI.

An interview was conducted at two types of Japanese companies: one established a CI department to implement CI, whereas the other did not establish a CI department and conducted CI in an ad hoc manner. Multicase studies were performed to examine companies with different organizational structures.

The CI scopes included a broad range of factors (e.g. technology, customers, markets, suppliers, economy, society, politics, legislation and regulation), and not only competitor analysis. An established CI department did not guarantee a well-organized CI process. Furthermore, the lack of such a department did not preclude systematic CI processes or activities.

The authors classified the CI in the companies the authors inspected as either systematic (organized CI) or ad hoc (unorganized CI) methods. The advantages and disadvantages of both are discussed. The authors found the promotion mechanisms in company-wide CI process, which can cause intelligence transfers from CI to absorptive capacity processes.

The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology of computer‐assisted roadmapping to supplement an expert‐based approach, which is time‐consuming and subjective.

A computer‐based approach using citation network analysis is used to depict technology trends, and build the first draft of science and technology roadmaps. A case study in energy research is performed, and emerging research domains are tracked in it by citation network analysis.

The analysis confirms that the fuel cell and solar cell are rapidly growing domains in energy research. The detailed research structures were investigated further by clustering. Each citation cluster has characteristic research topics, and there is a variety of growth trends among the clusters.

Constructing a corpus to analyze is not an easy task and one that affects the results, and therefore further research to evaluate the adequacy and validity of the corpus before citation network analysis is necessary. Including patents and analyzing relationships between academic papers and patents for roadmapping is a challenging future research topic.

While science and technology roadmaps are an attractive tool in R&D management and have been widely used, they are typically constructed by gathering and stimulating expert opinion and therefore highly time‐consuming. As demonstrated in this paper, a computer‐based approach using citation network analysis is a powerful tool to support roadmapping. By using the approach, planners and R&D managers can make decisions on effective investment in promising and emerging technologies, especially under circumstances of limited resources with the broader coverage of scientific and technological research.

By using citation network analysis, we can track emerging research domains among a range of publications efficiently and effectively.

This paper seeks to propose a method of discovering uncommercialized research fronts by comparing scientific papers and patents. A comparative study was performed to measure the semantic similarity between academic papers and patents in order to discover research fronts that do not correspond to any patents.

The authors compared structures of citation networks of scientific publications with those of patents by citation analysis and measured the similarity between sets of academic papers and sets of patents by natural language processing. After the documents (papers/patents) in each layer were categorized by a citation‐based method, the authors compared three semantic similarity measurements between a set of academic papers and a set of patents: Jaccard coefficient, cosine similarity of term frequency‐inverse document frequency (tfidf) vector, and cosine similarity of log‐tfidf vector. A case study was performed in solar cells.

As a result, the cosine similarity of tfidf was found to be the best way of discovering corresponding relationships.

This proposed approach makes it possible to obtain candidates of unexplored research fronts, where academic researches exist but patents do not. This methodology can be immediately applied to support the decision making of R&D investment by both R&D managers in companies and policy makers in government.

This paper enables comparison of scientific outcomes and patents in more detail by citation analysis and natural language processing than previous studies which just count the direct linkage from patents to papers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how business ecosystems evolve, what is the identity of business ecosystem and is the ecosystem identity static or dynamics. To understand the above questions, this paper is conducted on stone carving clusters in India.

The author engaged the ethnographic approach in this study. To sample stone carving clusters of India, the author followed the snowball sampling method. Further, the author did collect the information by informal personal discussions, focus group discussions and participant observations. Furthermore, the thematic analysis and interpretative phenomenological analysis were applied to process the data. The validity and reliability of the method was ascertained by testing the credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability.

The author found that the business ecosystem of stone carving was dynamic, and it was transformed from the buyer-driven ecosystem to the supplier-driven ecosystem. The identities of the early stage business ecosystem and the late stage ecosystem were analyzed through product, network and information flow. The author developed a structural framework to conceptualize the identity domain of the business ecosystem and the author named it as “nature-conduct-performance model.” Also, the author conceptualized the identity evolution, the influence of social system on business ecosystem identity, and identity-based conflicts and identity-based cooperation in the stone carving business ecosystem.

This study is making additional theoretical contribution in conceptualize the business ecosystem from the identity construct.