DESIGN AND SAMPLING
In terms of research design, first 60 petitions to participate in the Business Model Survey were requested by mail with an insignificant response rate showing on the one hand from a generalized tendency towards feeling reluctant about data sharing and, on the other hand, the need to undertake a different approach to inquire about sensitive information. The new approach brought a sample of 8 research participants for the business model interview to inform the business model research analysis and mapping that has been adapted from Osterwalder ontology (2004). A sample of 155 startups founded between 2010 and 2016 has been reviewed from the 243 total count of companies in Hull digital economy accessed from Duedil website. From the 155 initial business list, data from the 27 companies and two incubators (The Enterprise Centre and C4DI) Facebook pages has been downloaded from the Facebook API using the Netvizz Facebook app. Gephi has been used to create graphs in order to perform social media and network observations for the two selected hubs. Further social media and network analysis have been made in terms of the global presence of the totally of companies with facebook pages using data containing information on likes per country of each Facebook page.
Incubators participants:
C4DI - Centre for Digital Innovation
Enterprise Centre - The University of Hull
Data cleaning, validation, and enrichment resulted in a new unique database containing information of the 155 startups of Hull digital economy cluster. For each company under observation, I indexed the sector, hub, foundation, issues (Keywords, not found, location, not working, no issues), social media presence (the web, facebook, twitter), contact information, trade debtors ratio, net assets ratio, debt to capital and liquidity ratio. I used the Duedil collection of Hull Digital economy public data from 2015 to harvest the information which has been complemented with a personalized validation for each company.
