The rush for patents in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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.