Strategic innovation management on the basis of searching and mining press releases

Press releases may contain a lot of information that is especially applicable in strategic innovation management: They contain up-to-date information by definition and thus may give hints to upcoming trends and techniques. They also tell a lot about the strategies of partners, customers, and, most of all, competitors. We analysed many of today's existing press release search engines and identified a number of shortcomings: The query frontends do not provide enough flexibility with regards to search space restriction, the result lists presentation typically cannot be influenced by the user, and the ranking order stays often unclear. Press releases offer a number of features that make them useful for automatic handling but are widely ignored by today's search engines: They are relatively homogenously structured and contain certain kinds of easy-extractable meta-data that can be utilized for use cases such as monitoring trends (date of publishing), discovering geographical competency clusters (author and address information), or identifying relations between companies (firm name mentioning). We describe the prototype of a new press release search engine that makes use of the above-mentioned meta-data and additionally offers sophisticated search features tailored to the needs of innovation professionals.(1)