Who is Researching Innovation: A Study of Visitors to Imaginatik’s Web Site in Early 2006

The interest in innovation has surged over the past 12 months. There seem to be ten times as many conferences on the subject of innovation. There are also more job opportunities available and more coverage in the press.

The range of different organizations investigating innovation and innovation management systems, like Imaginatik's Idea Central, is astounding! To illustrate this variety, Imaginatik Research has conducted a study of the organizations that visited our web site, www.imaginatik.com, between 1 January 2006 and 25 May 2006.

From the 2500 named organizations on the list of site visitors, we excluded government and educational institutions and then identified the type of business of the remaining companies. The chart below shows the broad range of businesses interested in innovation, and highlights which sectors of industry are particularly active in undertaking investigations in this area at the moment – Professional Services, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and High-Tech.

Business sectors investigating innovation (source: Imaginatik, 2006)

Research Method

Like most companies, we retain a server log of all visitors to the web site. The IP address of each visitor is stored automatically, but not the name or any other details. We use a reverse DNS service to look up the registered owners of the IP addresses. The compiled list of company names is therefore automatically generated and we have not captured any personal data.

This is not a complete list of companies. Many firms hide their IP addresses, making it nearly impossible (without substantial effort) to uncover the identity of an unknown user.

We are only able to collect the IP addresses of 43% of web site visitors to our web site, leaving 57% of unknown visitors (i.e. mixture of companies, government, universities and general web browsers).

Reference: Who is Researching Innovation - RN-0806-1