How Industry 4.0 is driving global patent applications
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as 4IR or Industry 4.0, is widely considered to mean the automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial processes using modern smart technology.
It has been driven by the development of key technologies in the fields of telecommunications and processing. Innovation has also become more commercially feasible due to the drop in the cost of processing powers that can deliver connectivity on a scale not seen before.
A report by the European Patent Office (EPO), “Patents and the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the global technology trends enabling the data-driven economy”, released on December 10, provides evidence of an explosive growth in innovation stemming from the global data economy.
With the sudden rise of informatics-based inventions, eg, the maturing of bioinformatics and biomedical informatics as technical fields, it is of little surprise to see such a marked growth in patent filings in this area.
Surge in patent filings
As explained by the EPO’s chief economist Yann Ménière at the EPO’s conference, ‘The Role of patents in an AI driven world’, patent applications in the domain of the Fourth Industrial Revolution have seen a year-on-year growth of around 20% from 2010 to 2018.
This is five times higher than the growth in most other technology sectors. Broadly, the patent applications have fallen into three categories: core technologies, enabling technologies, and application domains.
The core technologies are typically hardware-based, or they relate to the management of network traffic. They facilitate the flow of data between a source and processor which then allows enabling technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to exploit this data.
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