This paper was presented at The XXV ISPIM Conference – Innovation for Sustainable Economy & Society, Dublin, Ireland on 8-11 June 2014. The publication is available to ISPIM members at www.ispim.org. 1 SOCIAL NETWORK SERVICES AS A HIGH POTENTIAL INDICATOR FOR MEASURING INNOVATION Hajikhani, Arash* Lappeenranta University of Technology, PO Box 20, FI-53851 Lappeenranta, Finland E-mail: arash.hajikhani@lut.fi Porras, Jari Lappeenranta University of Technology, PO Box 20, FI-53851 Lappeenranta, Finland E-mail: Jari.porras@lut.fi Melkas, Helinä Lahti School of Innovation, Saimaankatu 11, FI-15140 Lahti, Finland Email: helina.melkas@lut.fi Abstract: Innovation as a wide concept, includes many dimensions. Thus, measuring innovation seems to be a difficult task to be performed. Measuring innovation is a crucial issue, since the business growth and profitability in the knowledge era depend on innovation. The aim of present research is to investigate innovation measurements with a focus on those involving customer views. Recently, social media networks became a dominant communication platform between final users and companies. User-generated content (UGC) in social media will be introduced as a source of information to measure innovation. The data was collected from the Twitter website over a one-year period. Afterwards, an opinion mining technique (Sentiment Analysis) was utilized to understand the polarity of tweets. The results revealed that UGC can be considered as a potential indicator for innovation evaluation purposes. A positive correlation has been observed between the major ranking indexes such as Forbes and the overall public opinion about that particular company. Moreover, the methodology can help researchers and firms to learn about customers’ viewpoints regarding their final products or services. Keywords: Social network services; Twitter; Innovation evaluation; Content analysis; Sentiment analysis