Business model mining: Analyzing a firm's business model with text mining of annual report

Abstract

As the business model is receiving considerable attention these days, the ability to collect business model related information has become essential requirement for a company. The annual report is one of the most important external documents which contain crucial information about the company's business model. By investigating business descriptions and their future strategies within the annual report, we can easily analyze a company's business model. However, given the sheer volume of the data, which is usually over a hundred pages, it is not practical to depend only on manual extraction. The purpose of this study is to complement the manual extraction process by using text mining techniques. In this study, the text mining technique is applied in business model concept extraction and business model evolution analysis. By concept, we mean the overview of a company's business model within a specific year, and, by evolution, we mean temporal changes in the business model concept over time. The efficiency and effectiveness of our methodology is illustrated by a case example of three companies in the US video rental industry.