Co-occurrence analysis in innovation management: Data processing of an online brainstorming platform

To adapt to the rapid changing business environment, it is important for businesses to adopt open innovation strategy in their daily research and development routines. The Creative Concerto Platform (CCP) created by CCIS (Center for Creativity and Innovation Studies) helps organizations to leverage the power of crowd sourcing. CCP is an online brainstorming platform for product and service innovation process, which enables a variety of stakeholders to participate in a large scale brainstorming activity over the Internet. Due to the excessive number of participants of CCP in contrast to traditional face-to-face brainstorming sessions, the large amount of data generated in the process can not be analyzed efficiently without additional help. To identify the key issues and ideas in such a big data pool, we developed an information system module to extract key concepts in each article posted by the participants. Furthermore, to get a better understanding of how the key concepts are linked together conceptually in the discussion session, we utilized co-occurrence analysis to see which concepts occurs in pair and the frequency of the co-occurrence instances, and a visual presentation of the network of concepts can be generated to give us a better understanding of the relationships between the concepts. The system can also generate network data and visual presentation of the relationships between the participants for us to identify if there´s any opinion leader emerges from the brainstorming process. In this essay, we use data form a CCP event as an example to illustrate how co-occurrence analysis can be helpful for the data processing and creative idea generation process, and why it is important for business to deploy open innovation strategy to gain innovative inputs from users / customers.