Savin Ivan, Chukavina Kristina, Pushkarev Andrey
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Graduate School of Economics and Management, Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russian Federation.
Small Bus Econ (Dordr). 2023;60(2):659-689. doi: 10.1007/s11187-022-00609-6. Epub 2022 Mar 1.
To foresee global economic trends, one needs to understand the present startup companies that soon may become new market leaders. In this paper, we explore textual descriptions of more than 250 thousand startups in the Crunchbase database. We analyze the 2009-2019 period by using topic modeling. We propose a novel classification of startup companies free from expert bias that contains 38 topics and quantifies the weight of each of these topics for all the startups. Taking the year of establishment and geographical location of the startups into account, we measure which topics were increasing or decreasing their share over time, and which of them were predominantly present in Europe, North America, or other regions. We find that the share of startups focused on data analytics, social platforms, and financial transfers, and time management has risen, while an opposite trend is observed for mobile gaming, online news, and online social networks as well as legal and professional services. We also identify strong regional differences in topic distribution, suggesting certain concentration of the startups. For example, sustainable agriculture is presented stronger in South America and Africa, while pharmaceutics, in North America and Europe. Furthermore, we explore which pairs of topics tend to co-occur more often together, quantify how multisectoral the startups are, and which startup classes attract more investments. Finally, we compare our classification to the one existing in the Crunchbase database, demonstrating how we improve it.
要预见全球经济趋势，就需要了解那些很快可能成为新市场领导者的初创公司。在本文中，我们探索了Crunchbase数据库中超过25万家初创公司的文本描述。我们通过主题建模分析了2009年至2019年期间的数据。我们提出了一种新颖的初创公司分类方法，该方法不受专家偏见影响，包含38个主题，并对所有初创公司的每个主题权重进行了量化。考虑到初创公司的成立年份和地理位置，我们衡量了哪些主题的份额随时间增加或减少，以及哪些主题主要出现在欧洲、北美或其他地区。我们发现，专注于数据分析、社交平台、金融转账和时间管理的初创公司份额有所上升，而手机游戏、在线新闻、在线社交网络以及法律和专业服务则呈现相反趋势。我们还发现主题分布存在明显的地区差异，这表明初创公司存在一定的集中性。例如，可持续农业在南美洲和非洲的表现更为突出，而制药业在北美和欧洲更为突出。此外，我们探索了哪些主题对往往更经常共同出现，量化了初创公司的多部门程度，以及哪些初创公司类别吸引了更多投资。最后，我们将我们的分类与Crunchbase数据库中现有的分类进行比较，展示了我们如何对其进行改进。
