The recently introduced technological innovation system (TIS) life cycle allows analyzing the decline of mature technologies. This study complements the associated empirical indicators by proposing a novel text-based innovation output indicator based on the media's role in forming collective expectations. We process more than 15,000 English news articles to capture the media's reporting on technological improvements of the internal combustion engine (ICE). Our results depict an increasing number of innovation articles with positive sentiment until 2015. More recently, we observe a decrease in innovation articles. Along with the decreasing ICE sales and performance data, this weakening support of the media for the TIS innovation output suggests a possible misalignment with collective expectations that could lead to a vicious decline cycle. Our study offers a real-time indicator for monitoring innovation strategies and develops a methodological framework to derive technology-specific innovation indicators on the firm-level using unsupervised topic modelling and sentiment analysis.

最近引入的技术创新系统 (TIS) 生命周期允许分析成熟技术的衰落。本研究通过基于媒体在形成集体期望中的作用提出一种新颖的基于文本的创新产出指标来补充相关的经验指标。我们处理超过 15,000 篇英文新闻文章，以捕捉媒体对内燃机 (ICE) 技术改进的报道。我们的结果显示，在 2015 年之前，具有积极情绪的创新文章越来越多。最近，我们观察到创新文章的数量有所减少。随着 ICE 销售和业绩数据的下降，媒体对 TIS 创新产出的支持减弱表明可能与集体预期不一致，从而导致恶性下降循环。