Application of Text (Idea) Mining to Internet Surveys: Electronic Capture of the Structure of Ideas and Semantic Concepts

This paper demonstrates a quick and efficient method of assessing the ideation structure for a group of people via the Internet and text mining. Data collection using the Internet is increasing; although the Internet has made access easier figuring out what people think is still a challenge. Email was used to contact and then direct survey respondents to a web site. At the web site, openended questions requiring text (type written) responses were asked. Conceptual (ideation) structure was obtained via an algorithm similar to that suggested by Quillian [7] and Bonnet [1]. To discover ideation structure, a modified Hopfield neural network based text-mining algorithm was used to obtain the statistical weights of ideas and concepts and the weights of the joint occurrences of the ideas and concepts with other ideas and concepts. Applying neural network technologies to text allows the analysis of open-ended responses without incurring the expensive, timeconsuming and error-prone task of manually reading the open-ended comments. The Internet via email contact and web-based survey input dramatically speeds the process

Customer Development, Innovation, and Decision-Making Biases int he Lean Startup

This paper reviews current research relevant to new product development, customer development, and the lean startup. Customer development and the lean startup are a new and increasingly used form of entrepreneurship process, which rely on hypothesis testing but not in the traditional sense; the entrepreneur is encouraged to scan the environment, collect information, and form and evaluate educated guesses so as to make accurate judgments and decisions. The present research provides a review of the customer development model for entrepreneurial activities and a critique of this hypothesis testing methodology. We then consider ways in which to improve decision making within the startup via a systematic study of System 1 ( intuition) and System 2 ( reasoned and rational) decision-making styles. This paper has significant implications for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship support organizations, such as incubators and accelerators, and entrepreneurship educators, all of whom are increasingly practicing and teaching this process

The Impact of Consumer Product Package Quality on Consumption Satisfaction, Brand Perceptions, Consumer Investment and Behavior

Consumer product packaging can serve a critical role in the consumption experience, but marketing and packaging science researchers focus primarily on pre and post-consumption aspects of consumer product containers. Exhaustive research into packing ergonomics, logistics, safety, sustainability and promotional features are common across marketing and packaging disciplines, but research isolating the role of a packaging in consumption satisfaction and enduring consumer-brand relationships is rare. In addition to an undervalued role in product satisfaction, functional isolation between marketing and packaging scientists limits packaging’s overall impact on the bottom line. This research examines the role of bottle quality in bottled-water consumption satisfaction and its subsequent impact on brand attribute perceptions, consumer-brand relationship investment and behavioral intentions. We show that thicker water bottles are perceived to be of higher quality than thinner bottles, and that these perceptual differences impact how customers view a brand on aspects such as reliability and value offered by the brand’s products and ultimately intentions to re-purchase the brand’s products. We use qualitative, experimental and structural modeling analysis techniques to establish a fundamental role of packaging quality in consumer product satisfaction. We show that packaging characteristics are an indivisible component of the product and important to evaluation of the overall consumption experience. We finally conclude that packaging quality has a critical role to play in building profitable consumer-brand relationships, which should redefine the packaging cost-benefit equation to include the value of consumer loyalty as a balance to non-consumption packaging considerations