Mining quality determinants of product-service systems from user-generated contents

The concurrent availability of an ever-increasing volume of User-Generated Content (UGC) and text mining techniques has enabled methods to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research that was unimaginable a few years ago. These investigations have proved to generate interesting insights with potential implications in manufacturing and engineering design. This paper introduces a novel practical methodology to address the following research issue: how to infer the quality determinants of a Product-Service System (PSS) from UGCs? Analyzing a sample of UGCs by means of a topic modelling method, the idea of this study is to produce and examine the set of determinants relevant to the perception of the quality of a specific PSS. The application of the proposed approach is exemplified on a specific use-oriented PSS: car-sharing.