The rush for patents in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
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The rush for patents in the Fourth Industrial Revolution Mario Benassi1 · Elena Grinza2 · Francesco Rentocchini1 Received: 24 December 2019 / Revised: 14 April 2020 / Accepted: 28 April 2020 © Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale 2020
Abstract Our paper provides a novel and in-depth analysis of the technological trends, geographic distribution, and business-level dynamics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in the European Union from patent- and firm-level perspectives. We do so via the analysis of patents filed at the European Patent Office between 1985 and 2014. We employ a new matched patent-firm data set provided by the Bureau Van Dijk: ORBIS-IP. We find evidence of a surge in the patenting activity related to the 4IR in the past three decades, particularly in networked devices. Our results also suggest that firms filing 4IR patents have become progressively younger on average. At the same time, we find a steady growth in the average number of 4IR patent applications filed yearly by each company. Further variance decompositions show that the surge in 4IR patent applications is mainly explained by incumbent firms filing more 4IR patent applications over time, rather than new entrants progressively populating the 4IR world. Finally, we uncover a general trend emerging at the firm level, whereby firms tend to specialise in a few technological areas and avoid differentiation. Keywords Fourth Industrial Revolution · Industry 4.0 · Matched patent-firm data · Patent applications · EPO JEL Classification O30 · O33 · O34
* Elena Grinza [email protected] Mario Benassi [email protected] Francesco Rentocchini [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Management, and Quantitative Methods, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
2
Department of Management and Production Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Industrial and Business Economics
1 Introduction In this paper, we explore the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), also referred to as “Industry 4.0” (Kagermann 2015; Muscio and Ciffolilli 2019; Schwab 2016). According to scholars and practitioners, 4IR brings about new, unparalleled opportunities to modify social and economic systems (Agrawal et al. 2019). In its essence, 4IR is at the basis of the so-called “Society 5.0”, a new model of society based on a high degree of convergence between the cyberspace and the physical space, whereby a massive amount of information from sensors in the physical space is accumulated in the cyberspace (MEXT 2019). In the cyberspace, these big data are analysed by artificial intelligence (AI), and the analysis results are fed back to humans in the physical space in various forms. In sum, 4IR promises to enhance the distributed knowledge of a system drastically, while decreasing the role of human decision-makers. Technology would be on the verge of creating an intelligence “external to humans”, giving rise to a second economy (Arthur 2017). Massive flows of sensible data gathered with t
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