2005/19 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
The Revolution Within: ICT and the Shifting Knowledge Base of the World’s Largest Companies. |
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Sandro Mendonça |
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Keywords | ||
Technological diversification, Large firms, ICT, Patents.
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JEL Classifications | ||
O30, O32, O33.
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Abstract | ||
This empirical paper analyses the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in the technological
diversification trend among the world’s largest manufacturing firms during the
1980s and 1990s. The objective of the research is twofold: firstly, to
emphasise the emerging differences among technologies when companies from
different industries patent outside their traditional technological
capabilities; secondly, to investigate whether the tendency among large
companies from all industries to patent in ICT is distinctive when compared
with the tendency to patent in other technologies. We find that technological
diversification in large companies has clearly occurred in ICTs. Non-ICT
specialist industries increasingly develop, rather than just utilise, the
cluster of ICT-related technologies. We conclude that the development of
corporate capabilities in the key technologies of the emerging ICT paradigm is
more widespread than previously emphasised in the literature. One implication
of this observation is that technological diversification and the information
revolution may be related phenomena.
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