Topic Modelling of Management Research Assertions to Develop Insights into the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Enhancing the Value Propositions of Early-Stage Growth-Oriented Companies

The article suggests a Value Proposition (VP) framework that enables analysis of the beneficial impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) resources and capabilities on specific VP activities. To develop such a framework, we examined existing business and management research publications to identify and extract assertions that could be used as a source of actionable insights for early-stage growth-oriented companies. The extracted assertions were assembled into a corpus of texts that was subjected to topic modelling analysis—a machine learning approach to natural language processing that is used to identify latent themes in large corpora of text documents. The topic modelling resulted in the identification of seven topics. Each topic is defined by a set of most frequent words co-occurring in a distinctive subset of texts that could be interpreted in terms of activities constituting the core elements of the VP framework. We then examined each activity in terms of its potential to be enhanced by employing AI resources and capabilities. The interpretation of the topic modelling results led to the identification of seven topics: (1) Value created; (2) Stakeholder value propositions; (3) Foreign market entry; (4) Customer base; (5) Continuous improvement; (6) Cross-border operations; and (7) Company image. The uniqueness of the adopted topic modelling approach consists in the quality of the assertions and the interpretation of the seven topics as an activity framework, i.e., in its capacity to generate actionable insights for practitioners. The additional analysis suggests that there is a potential for AI to enhance the emerging four core elements of the VP framework: Value created, Stakeholder value propositions, Foreign market entry, and Customer base. More importantly, we found that the greatest number of assertions related to activities that could be enhanced by AI are part of the Customer base topic, i.e., the topic that is most directly related to the growth potential of the companies. In addition, the VP framework suggests that a company’s customer base growth is continuously enhanced through a positive loop enabled by activities focused on the Continuous improvement of the activities and the amount of Value created, the alignment of Stakeholder value propositions, and companies’ Foreign market entry. Thus, the multiple-stakeholder perspective on VP development and foreign market entry appears as a factor that helps in understanding the beneficial impact of AI on the enhancement of the VP of early-stage growth-oriented companies.