In this article, we describe our efforts to adapt and validate a web search and analytics tool– the Gnowit Cognitive Insight Engine – to evaluate the growth and competitive potential ofnew technology startups and existing firms in the newly emerging precision medicine sector.The results are based on two different search ontologies and two different samples offirms. The first sample includes established drug companies operating in the precisionmedicine field and was used to estimate the relationship between the firms’ innovativenessand the extent of online discussions focusing on their potential growth. The second sampleincludes new technology firms in the same sector. The firms in the second sample wereused as test cases to determine whether their growth-related web search scores would relateto the degree of their innovativeness. The second part of the study applied the samemethodology to the real-time monitoring of the firms’ competitive actions. In our findings,we see that our methodology reveals a moderate degree of correlation between the InsightEngine’s algorithmically computed relevance scores and independent measures of innovationpotential. The existence of such correlations invites future work in attempting to analyzecompany growth potential using techniques founded in web content scraping, naturallanguage processing, and machine learning.
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