TY - JOUR
T1 - Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact
AU - Montobbio, Fabio
AU - Staccioli, Jacopo
AU - Virgillito, Maria Enrica
AU - Vivarelli, Marco
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - This paper investigates the presence of explicit labour-saving heuristics within robotic patents. It analyses innovative actors engaged in robotic technology and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies the technological fields more exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language processing and probabilistic topic modelling techniques applied to the universe of USPTO patent applications between 2009 and 2018, matched with the ORBIS (Bureau van Dijk) firm-level dataset. The results show that labour-saving patent holders comprise not only robot producers, but mainly adopters. Consequently, labour-saving robotic patents appear along the entire supply chain. Additionally, labour-saving innovations are directed towards manual activities in services (e.g. in the logistics sector), activities entailing social intelligence (e.g. in the healthcare sector) and cognitive skills (e.g. learning and predicting).
AB - This paper investigates the presence of explicit labour-saving heuristics within robotic patents. It analyses innovative actors engaged in robotic technology and their economic environment (identity, location, industry), and identifies the technological fields more exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language processing and probabilistic topic modelling techniques applied to the universe of USPTO patent applications between 2009 and 2018, matched with the ORBIS (Bureau van Dijk) firm-level dataset. The results show that labour-saving patent holders comprise not only robot producers, but mainly adopters. Consequently, labour-saving robotic patents appear along the entire supply chain. Additionally, labour-saving innovations are directed towards manual activities in services (e.g. in the logistics sector), activities entailing social intelligence (e.g. in the healthcare sector) and cognitive skills (e.g. learning and predicting).
KW - Labour-saving technology
KW - Probabilistic topic models
KW - Robotic patents
KW - Search heuristics
KW - Labour-saving technology
KW - Probabilistic topic models
KW - Robotic patents
KW - Search heuristics
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10807/193645
U2 - 10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121122
DO - 10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121122
M3 - Article
SN - 0040-1625
VL - 174
SP - N/A-N/A
JO - Technological Forecasting and Social Change
JF - Technological Forecasting and Social Change
ER -