Posts Tagged: "Fourth Industrial Revolution technology"

The European Patent Office (EPO) issued a press release and 75-page study on December 10, titled “Patents and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the global technology trends enabling the data-driven economy,” which examined global trends in innovation in fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies. As used in the study, 4IR denotes “the full integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the context of manufacturing and application areas such as personal, home, vehicle, enterprise and infrastructure,” and it marks a “radical step towards a fully data-driven economy.” The study examined international patent families (IPFs), i.e., inventions for which patent applications have been filed in two or more patent offices, related to 4IR worldwide between 2000 and 2018. The study revealed that, between 2010 and 2018, global patent filings for 4IR technologies, including smart connected objects, Internet of Things, Big Data, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), grew at an average annual rate of almost 20%, which is nearly five times faster than the average of all technology fields.