Fostering the innovation process by textual analysis of stakeholder opinions

Stakeholder concerns and opinions related to employee attitudes about their work are grouped into dimensions to allow insight to be gained and to facilitate innovative solutions to perceived problems. The concept of lexical analysis of human communication is developed, and examples of the technique taken from actual industrial experience are shown. A mathematical framework for clustering text into problem dimensions is proposed, and a morphological characterization of text is used to expose features of a problem which might otherwise not be apparent. It is concluded that the analysis of textural data opens many opportunities to study complex decision problems which do not lend themselves to typical survey analysis, and that it cultivates creative decision making