Follow the money, goes the phrase, but first comes the idea. Before and below the financial engineering of investment lies the architecture of desire and fear. Now that computers are more capable than ever of dealing with the slippery nature of texts and behavior, why not apply the same mathematical tools we use to chart and explore financial dynamics to understand the dynamics of what the investment ecosystem is talking and thinking about?

That's the question behind Instituto Baikal's Investment Climatology Project, an ongoing initiative to map the conceptual dynamics of the particularly influential sub-culture that is the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

The most basic level of it is simply measurement: what's the investment world talking about? Or, more interestingly, what is it talking about in a different way? Crawling relevant publications and using NLP tools to extract and map the usage trajectories of different concepts, it's possible to extract patterns of change:

We can read here how cleantech is slowing down among the fast-growing terms, but that doesn't mean the field itself is; both decabornization as a larger-scale goal ("trend" would be too optimistic at this point) and specific technologies and markets are still very active. Of note: keywords measuring specific energy units are accelerating fast. "Green" or "electric" are no longer enough - competition now requires having better metrics (a good thing if you have them, and an area to invest into if you don't).

But we can also get a quick peek ahead by looking at the newly fast-rising terms. ADAS, a very uninspiring but also more accurate description of current "self"-driving technology, is speeding up a lot (pun not intended). It's probably a reasonable move now that regulators and the public have noticed that the footnotes going self-driving cars are only safe if a human has their hands on the wheel and is paying attention at all times (which sounds rather stressing) weren't there out of an excess of legal caution. It might signal that auto-pilot technology is on its way to become more solid and more limited (less gee-whiz, but also less PR disaster-prone); it's not where they are, but seems to be where the industry is trying to go, so adjust expectations accordingly.

Words also have their own geometry - lower-dimensional manifolds where it's possible to map fields of meaning.

Sampling this semantic space, Politics and Pandemics as topics are out, Consumer products and Climate change mitigation are in. We aren't in a post-pandemic world yet, but the collective investment mind is doing its best to get back to what it was doing.

These are all pictures of the now (although heavily processed in order to highlight useful patterns that might not be visible in the original form). What we are working on is the even more interesting question of how these pictures change over time. That's the why of the initiative's name: it's not about investment climate but about investment climatology. Not to accumulate data — no matter how big — but knowledge of the world.

(Spanish article at Instituto Baikal)