A patent-based cross impact analysis for quantitative estimation of technological impact: The case of information and communication technology

The increasing syntheses and interactions between various technologies increase the usefulness of cross impact analysis (CIA) as a method for forecasting and analyzing them. Conventional CIA depends on an expert's qualitative judgment or intuition and thus it is difficult to evaluate quantitatively the impact of one technology on another. In this study, we employ patent analysis in CIA to examine such impacts between technologies based on multiple patent classifications. Patent information is used for facilitating quantitative and systematic approach in CIA. The distinctive feature and main contribution of the proposed approach is the overcoming of the limitations of conventional CIA, by employing conditional probabilities based on the patent information. The classification of patents, particularly the multiple classifications, is used to evaluate the relationships between technologies. As an illustration, a patent-based CIA with information and communication technologies (ICTs) was conducted. Firstly, the patent-based cross impact among ICTs was calculated. Secondly, the technology pairs were classified based on the cross impact score between ICTs. Thirdly, a cross impact network was constructed to identify the complex relation among ICTs. Finally, the changes in cross impact scores between technologies over time were analyzed. The results of this research are expected to help practitioners to forecast future trends and to develop better R&D strategies.     

Terrorism and its impact on economic growth and technological innovation

Recent terrorist acts, in particular the 9-11 attacks in 2001, have created disruptions in the global economy. The short-term impact had been felt in the global tourism, airline industries, as well as the financial markets. While the global economy has recovered and is adjusting to the new global realities, the longer-term impact of heightened security risk across the world can be felt in the form of higher risk premiums in asset markets, as well as a shift of resources towards dealing with terrorism. Just as World War II had accelerated the development of nuclear energy as well as a major contributing factor in the genesis of Silicon Valley, the current war against terrorism will affect both the pace and trajectory of technology trends, as efforts are focused on developing technologies to combat terrorism. In this paper, we review the effects of the current war on terrorism in terms of its impact on the economy, the allocation of resources to R&D, and the trajectory of future R&D.     

The impact of disembodied technological progress on unemployment

This paper studies the relationship between disembodied technological progress and unemployment in a standard search-matching model. We find that the sign of the correlation crucially depends on the degree of idiosyncratic uncertainty. The analysis uncovers a new effect whereby an increase in growth intensifies the endogenous rate of job separation because it raises the workers' outside option. For plausible parameter values, the outside option effect outweighs the capitalization effect, so that disembodied technological progress increases the rate of unemployment.     

技术壁垒对出口产品价格梯度影响的模型构建与实证分析

技术壁垒一旦形成并且实施,壁垒对进口产品就产生了明显的数量控制机制和价格控制机制的双重作用.即它既具有配额的数量控制作用,又形成了一种特殊的价格调节作用,其作用类似于关税但有其特殊性,是一种复合机制.本文研究分析了技术壁垒引致出口产品价格变化的空间梯度场模型,并根据模型实证分析了技术壁垒对我国出口产品价格梯度的影响,提出了积极应对这种技术壁垒,提高我国出口产品国际竞争力的措施.     

Markov chain modeling of the global technological lifetime of copper

Markov chain modeling is applied to the global anthropogenic copper cycle for the year 2000. The lifetime of copper varies from product to product and region to region, as well as through time. Assumptions of average lifetimes are therefore subject to a high degree of uncertainty. A large state transition table is created that encompasses the life-cycle stages of copper (mining, smelting, refining, fabrication, use, waste management, scrap, and final disposal), five end-uses (buildings, transportation, consumer products, electrical equipment, and machinery) in eight world regions, including trade at every stage. The system requires closure by mass balance, so all possible routes of copper trade and recycling are considered. Transitions between each pair of states are calculated using previous material flow analysis data. The main result is that an atom of copper is used 1.9 times by human society before it enters final disposal. Scaling by the lifetime of copper in each life-cycle stage in each region gives a total average technological lifetime of copper of 60 years. A sensitivity analysis is applied to the model in order to test the robustness of the results. Several scenarios are also considered: increasing the recycling rate in each region to 70%, applying European or North American in-use lifetimes to all regions, and increasing the share of the world copper cathode and scrap markets taken in by Asia to 50%. Several limitations of the Markov chain approach are discussed, as are the further research opportunities it affords.     

Process and risk analysis about enterprises technological innovation

Successful innovation is so important that enterprise scientifically manages the process and risk of technological innovation. Firstly, the process of innovation is generalized to seven stages including formation of innovation idea, investigation and evaluation, research and development, middle test, mass production, marketing and selling, after service and feedback. Secondly, the origin of risk in the process of innovation is analyzed. The purpose is to help enterprise identify risk and take countermeasure to minimize the potential loss and maximize the potential income.     

The Innovation impact model: a tool t0 study the impact of technological change

This article shows that the builders of interorganizational information systems (IOSs) struggle most with the problem of whether to build them alone or in an alliance mode. It is suggested that the situation should be studied in the light of the transaction costs involved in the application ofthe IOS. The nature of the application to be handled through the IOS should be the main detemrlnant of IOS design. According to the study, as derived from the transaction cost approach, applications with low transaction

costs are suitable for alliance networks whereas those with high transaction costs should be constructed from an organization's own resources. A market-hierarchy/decision-maker model for determining the righi way to participate in IOSs is introduced. There is a visible trend leading to a proportionally greater use of markets. Information technology lowers transaction costs, and more and more products and services become suitable for marketing through IOSs. A case example is dmwn from the Finnish Insurance Industry, where direct writing is the dominant governance structure. The transaction costs in motor vehicle insurance are studied.     

The Innovation impact model: a tool t0 study the impact of technological change

In the spirit of the US Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award, companies try to develop a strategy towards improving their operations. These companies look for assistance in assessing how new technology will help. While literature looks at innovations from different perspectives, the impact of innovations is rarely studied. This article offers the 'Innovation Impact Model' as a tool to help companies visualize the effects of innovations on their performance and competitive situation. Three example are provided in which the Innovation Impact Model has been applied. First, the impact of basic oxygen furnaces on the national steel industries of Japan, West Germany, and the USA is examined. Second, the impact of eletric are furnaces on the development of production costs at the Atlantic Steel Plant in Atlanta is studied. Finally, it is shown how 'voluntary restraint agreements' in the early 1970s had only a tempoorary impact on improving the trade postion of the US steel industry.     

The impact of technological opportunity on the dynamics of trade performance

The paper examines statistically whether the degree to which countries are specialised in and/or increasingly move into sectors with above average levels of technological opportunity has any impact on growth in aggregate market shares of exports. A novelty of the paper is that it applies structural decomposition (SD) analysis not only on trade statistics, but also on US patent statistics. Nineteen countries and 17 manufacturing sectors for the period 1965–1988 are considered. A number of variables, in addition to the effects from the SD analysis, are included as explanatory variables. In this context, it is shown that there is a positive relationship between trade performance and the individual country’s ability to move into technological sectors offering above average technological opportunity.     

Financial system and technological catching-up: an empirical analysis

This paper explores the role of the financial system in technological catching-up in the expectation that financing mechanisms affect the production and the exports of new or “new to the market” commodities. We have developed indices of related export variety (REV) and of unrelated export variety (UEV) by using the informational entropy function for a sample of 97 countries using NBER & UN trade data for the period 1992–2005. We used these indices sequentially as dependent variables with the bank credit ratio and stock market capitalization ratio as independent variables. In addition, we include the education system, natural resources and four principal component factors characterizing the cost of doing business, political system, quality of governance and the degree of openness of the countries as control variables in our regressions. Our pooled regression models show that the financial system is an important determinant of both types of export variety for all countries but that, for the most successful developers, the banking system and the stock market play different roles, with the former being relatively more appropriate for REV and the latter for UEV. Such specialization of different forms of the financial system seems to confirm that stock markets are likely to be relatively more appropriate to fund the exploratory type of innovations which are required to increase UEV.     

Consideration of technological and environmental heterogeneity in cost efficiency analysis

In order to evaluate and compare the efficiency levels across banking industries, we adopt the meta-frontier model that can assess the technological difference among countries. Given the importance of country specific conditions, we include in our analysis the different specificities of each country to incorporate the technological as the environmental differences in the evaluation of banking efficiencies. Using data on the banking industries of several countries in the MENA region, over the period 1991–2011, the results of the efficiency scores corrected by the technological and environmental gap led us to conclude that Egyptian banks are the most efficient in terms of cost compared with banks in other countries. Egyptian banks enjoy a very favourable banking technology. Our results support the hypothesis that traditional techniques of efficiency analysis based on the efficiency scores of a specific and pooled frontier tend to mystify efficiency levels and may incorrectly identify efficient banks. This paper contributes to the efficiency literature by incorporating technological and environmental heterogeneities in the evaluation of efficiency. This helps to characterize the production process of a bank and provides common standards by which the efficiencies of banks in different countries can be compared in a meaningful way with each other.     

Assessing the potential impact of Microfinance with agent-based modeling

Recent empirical results have cast doubt on the value of Microfinance as a tool for reducing poverty. But, the difficulty lies in evaluating the impact of Microfinance in a world where the Microfinance institutions, their borrowers, and government policies are constantly changing. There is a need for a comprehensive and transparent framework to develop the theoretical grounds for believing in (or against) the efficacy of Microfinance, which can at the same time be used as a testing ground for policymakers. This paper presents a first attempt to develop an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework for pre-policy-implementation testing of the effects of Microfinance. Under the ABM paradigm, a set of behaviors for individual agents in the economy is used to construct a simulation whereby random interaction allows agents to change their state over time. Simulation of the model in different scenarios supported all our intuitions about Microfinance; in particular, there was positive impact of Microfinance on the wealth level of the poor. It was found that increase of available funds, easy access for producers and lower interest rates increase the effectiveness of Microfinance.     

Technological learning,technological substitution,and technological change

From a simple dynamic model of competition between product lines it is shown that the shape of learning curves has a powerful influence on the dynamics of technological substitution. Learning of both production efficiency and marketing efficiency is considered. It is asserted that both types of learning are important and that the two are complementary. It is further speculated that production learning is probably more important for commodities and in situations of low per capita income, whereas market learning gains ascendancy in cases of high income and specialized and diversified product lines. In closing, it is noted that simple competitive models are misleading, first because complementarities and coevolutionary processes are probably as important in the overall development of technology as are competitive processes, and second because optimization of the technological system's parts does not guarantee improvement of the performance of the system as a whole.     

The impact of trade costs on exports: An empirical modeling

Studies, which have discussed some of the important issues concerning the measurement of trade costs, have conceded that the literature is still in the early stages of understanding and measuring what the real costs are. It is in this context, decomposing trade costs into ‘natural’ costs, ‘behind the border’ costs, ‘explicit beyond the border’ costs, and ‘implicit beyond the border’ costs, this paper suggests a method to measure the impacts of these components on changes in exports between countries in the absence of complete information on all the components of trade costs in home and partner countries. Empirical measurement has been demonstrated using 1999 and 2004 trade data from Pakistan. The results show that Pakistan's export growth between 1999 and 2004 came mainly from the reduction in both ‘explicit and implicit beyond the border’ trade costs in partner countries.     

Isolation and technological innovation

Despite its importance as a formative influence in evolutionary biology, the notion of isolation has received relatively little attention in evolutionary economics and its application to technological innovation. This paper makes the case that isolation, in many guises, is a pervasive and permanent feature of the economic landscape and that its implications for technological innovation deserve further analysis. Isolation and potential implications for innovation are discussed in the early part of the paper and case studies of two military innovations are then used to illustrate the value of explicitly recognising various forms of isolation in explaining observed aspects of innovation process and outcomes.     

A stochastic patent citation analysis approach to assessing future technological impacts

The anticipation and forecast of technological changes are of vital importance, as technological advances become increasingly fast and complex. What is at the core is identification of the current technologies that will drive technological changes over the coming few years. In this respect, numerous approaches have been devised to assess future technological impacts based on patent citation information, but do not provide a fair reflection of dynamic and idiosyncratic aspects of technological impacts as they are deterministic methods based on simple citation counts. We propose a stochastic patent citation analysis that can assess future technological impacts in a time period of interest by employing the future citation count as a proxy. At the heart of the proposed approach is a Pareto/NBD (Negative Binomial Distribution) model for taking into account the dynamic and idiosyncratic aspects of technological impacts. A patent citation matrix is first constructed for each time unit with citation patterns of the past. The future technological impacts are then derived by Pareto/NBD sub-model and gamma–gamma sub-model. A case study of the display technology patents is presented to illustrate the proposed approach. We believe our method can be employed in various research fields, from narrow patent valuation, to broad technological analysis and planning.     

Green technological diversification of European ICT firms: a patent-based analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates whether and how diversified firms in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector innovate in green technologies and assess the potential impact of these innovations on firm performance. The analysis relies on a balanced panel dataset of European ICT firms in the period 2009–2013. The results suggest an inverted u-shaped relationship between the extent of technological diversification and the likelihood to develop green technologies. Technological diversification generally increases the likelihood of green innovations, but too high a dispersion of resources across a large variety of different technologies decreases the intensity of green innovations. The results show also that the development of green technologies is positively associated with firm performance: ICT firms involved in green patenting activity perform better than ICT firms with no green patents.     

The impact of the corporate average fuel economy standards on technological changes in automobile fuel efficiency

This paper empirically examines the effect of the U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards on the technological progress in automobile fuel efficiency. Using detailed vehicle attributes data from 1978 through 2018, we find that more stringent fuel economy standards increase the rate of technological improvements in new passenger cars, and this effect is primarily driven by the response of U.S. automakers. We do not find evidence that CAFE standards have a similar effect on the technical change in light-duty trucks. Our results also indicate that higher gasoline prices have a significant and positive effect on the improvement of fuel-saving technology in both passenger cars and light trucks. Using our empirical estimates, we project that the recent rollback of Obama-era CAFE standards would forego an approximately 2-percent increase in cars’ fuel economy over the 2021–2025 period as a result of technological progress.     

REXS: A forecasting model for assessing the impact of natural resource consumption and technological change on economic growth

This paper describes the development of a forecasting model in the tradition of system dynamics. It is called Resource EXergy Services (REXS). The model simulates economic growth of the US through the 20th century and extrapolates the simulation for several decades into the next century. The REXS model differs from previous energy–economy models such as DICE and NICE [Nordhaus, W.D., 1991. The cost of slowing climate change: a survey. The Energy Journal 12 (1), 37–66] by eliminating the assumption of exogenously driven exponential growth along a so-called ‘optimal trajectory’. Instead, we suggest a simple model representing the dynamics of technological change in terms of decreasing energy (exergy) intensity and endogenously increasing efficiency of conversion of raw material and fuel inputs (exergy) to primary exergy services (‘useful work’).In our model, the traditional assumption of exogenous technological progress (total factor productivity) increasing at a constant rate is replaced by two learning processes based, respectively, on (i) cumulative economic output and (ii) cumulative energy (exergy) service (useful work) production experience. The initial results of simulation for the period 2000–2050 have significant implications for future trends in economic output. These implications are important for purposes of scenario analysis. The REXS modules are the focus of ongoing research. We discuss briefly the many possibilities for elaboration of each module to enrich the feedback dynamics, policy levers and post-scenario analyses.