Empowering innovation insights: How ZEW Mannheim analyzed research collaborations using web-based AI indicators
ISTARI developed AI-based web indicators for ZEW Mannheim to detect collaborations between firms and research institutions on websites, enabling new insights into how partnerships and their communication influence companies' innovation performance.
24 November 2025Empowering innovation insights: How ZEW Mannheim analyzed research collaborations using web-based AI indicators
ISTARI developed AI-based web indicators for ZEW Mannheim to detect collaborations between firms and research institutions on websites, enabling new insights into how partnerships and their communication influence companies' innovation performance.
The Challenge
Capturing collaboration signals for innovation analysis
ZEW Mannheim aimed to examine how collaborations with public research institutions affect companies’ innovation performance. A key focus was to distinguish between actual collaborations with knowledge transfer and the communication of these partnerships through company websites. While the first dimension could be studied using traditional data, there was no reliable method to systematically capture and analyze the communication of collaborations online. A new approach was needed to make these signals measurable.
Our Solution
AI-based web indicators for collaboration detection
Drawing on expertise in large-scale web data analysis and machine learning, ISTARI built innovative web-based indicators to detect company collaborations with research institutions from website content. This solution processed extensive multilingual web data to identify references to research projects, partnerships, and co-creation activities. The resulting indicators captured which companies highlight such collaborations publicly on their websites, creating a unique new dataset for empirical research.
The Impact
New insights into innovation performance and collaboration strategy
The collaboration enabled ZEW Mannheim to empirically analyze the distinct effects of conducted versus communicated collaborations on company innovation outcomes.
“The results show that companies actively engaging in collaborations achieved higher revenues from market innovations, indicating an increase in radical innovations. On the other hand, companies that communicated their collaborations via their websites recorded higher revenues from firm-specific innovations, suggesting improvements in incremental innovations.”
— Dr. Bastian Krieger, Head of the Co-Creation Research Group at ZEW
This nuanced understanding helps policymakers and business leaders design better strategies to foster impactful science–business collaborations, supporting both breakthrough and incremental innovation across industries.
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