What is the mission of innovation?

TL;DR

This study analyzes the content of mission statements across various sectors and countries, revealing sector-specific language patterns and the influence of regional context on mission similarities.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of mission statements from diverse institutions worldwide using advanced text analysis methods, highlighting sector and regional differences.

Findings

Research institutions use less lexically diverse, positive language in their missions.

Non-profit missions frequently include CSR-related jargon.

Sector and regional contexts significantly influence mission statement content.

Abstract

Governments and organizations recognize the need to revisit a mission-driven innovation amidst national and organizational innovation policy formulations. Notwithstanding a fertile research agenda on mission statements (hereafter mission(s)), several lines of inquiry remain open, such as crossnational and multisectorial studies and an examination of research knowledge intensive institutions. In this article, we identify similarities and differences in the content of missions from government, private, higher education, and health research knowledge intensive institutions in a sample of over 1,900 institutions from 89 countries through the deployment of sentiment analysis, readability, and lexical diversity; semantic networks; and a similarity computation between document corpus. We found that missions of research knowledge intensive institutions are challenging to read texts with lower lexical diversity that favors positive rather than negative words. In stark contrast to this, the non-profit sector is consonant in multiple dimensions in its use of Corporate Social Responsibility jargon. The lexical appearance of research in the missions varies according to mission sectorial context, and each sector has a cluster specific focus. Utilizing the mission as a strategic planning tool in higher income regions might serve to explain corpora similarities shared by sectors and continents.