Digit Debates: How can online employee reviews help firms to innovate?

9 December 2020

1:00pm-2:00pm

Summary

What can firms learn from online company reviews about their employees’ attitude to innovation?  And how can this help firms to innovate?

In this talk, Professor Nachiappan Subramanian will outline his research into the factors that affect firms’ ability to harness information from their suppliers in order to innovate.   Using computer-aided content analysis (text mining), the factors driving employees’ intent to learn were captured from Glassdoor, a well-known online platform for company reviews.

Professor Subramanian’s study found that both the extent to which the buying firm is embedded in the supplier network and factors influencing employee’s intention to learn from suppliers affect the extent to which firms effectively harness supplier insight to innovate.

Professor Subramanian argues that use of online reviews could provide a firm with a cost effective and swift way of learning about what drives employees to learn from suppliers to increase innovation performance.

Bio

Professor Nachiappan Subramanian has 23 years of experience including 21 years in academia and two years in a consulting company. He has a versatile teaching experience in several countries including the UK, China, India and Australia. Nachi is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK, and has written several book chapters. His writing on emerging topics such as delivery drones and successful retail operations in the hyper-customisation era has received media attention.