Exploring national digital transformation and Industry 4.0 policies through text mining: a comparative analysis including the Turkish case

Purpose This paper aims to use text mining methods to explore the similarities and differences between countries’ national digital transformation (DT) and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) policies. The study examines the applicability of text mining as an alternative for comprehensive clustering of national I4.0 and DT strategies, encouraging policy researchers toward data science that can offer rapid policy analysis and benchmarking. Design/methodology/approach With an exploratory research approach, topic modeling, principal component analysis and unsupervised machine learning algorithms (k-means and hierarchical clustering) are used for clustering national I4.0 and DT strategies. This paper uses a corpus of policy documents and related scientific publications from several countries and integrate their science and technology performance. The paper also presents the positioning of Türkiye’s I4.0 and DT national policy as a case from a developing country context. Findings Text mining provides meaningful clustering results on similarities and differences between countries regarding their national I4.0 and DT policies, aligned with their geographic, economic and political circumstances. Findings also shed light on the DT strategic landscape and the key themes spanning various policy dimensions. Drawing from the Turkish case, political options are discussed in the context of developing (follower) countries’ I4.0 and DT. Practical implications The paper reveals meaningful clustering results on similarities and differences between countries regarding their national I4.0 and DT policies, reflecting political proximities aligned with their geographic, economic and political circumstances. This can help policymakers to comparatively understand national DT and I4.0 policies and use this knowledge to reflect collaborative and competitive measures to their policies. Originality/value This paper provides a unique combined methodology for text mining-based policy analysis in the DT context, which has not been adopted. In an era where computational social science and machine learning have gained importance and adaptability to political and social science fields, and in the technology and innovation management discipline, clustering applications showed similar and different policy patterns in a timely and unbiased manner.