2020/03 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact |
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Fabio Montobbio, Jacopo Staccioli, Maria Enrica Virgillito and Marco Vivarelli |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Robotic Patents; Labour-Saving Technology; Search Heuristics; Probabilistic Topic Models.
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JEL Classifications | |||||||||||||||||
O33, J24, C38
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
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
particularly exposed to labour-saving innovations. It exploits advanced natural language
processing and probabilistic topic modelling techniques on the universe of patent
applications at the USPTO between 2009 and 2018, matched with ORBIS (Bureau van Dijk)
firm-level dataset. The results show that labour-saving patent holders comprise not
only robots producers, but also adopters. Consequently, labour-saving robotic patents
appear along the entire supply chain. The paper shows that labour-saving innovations
challenge manual activities (e.g. in the logistics sector), activities entailing social
intelligence (e.g. in the healthcare sector) and cognitive skills (e.g. learning and predicting).
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