The shift from competition between products or firms to ecosystem competition requires a deeper understanding of the emergence of technologies. The perspective of innovation ecosystems considers the development of technologies based on prior innovations, and therefore allows us to predict technology development based on the trajectories of existing products. We present a novel patent-based framework for early detection of enabling technologies in ecosystems. We test the framework on the case of the emergence of industry 4.0, and therefore establish a theoretical definition of industry 4.0, which we operationalize using longitudinal patent data. In this context, our analysis confirms that the surge of industry 4.0 innovation has stabilized on a high level. Through an exploratory patent citation analysis, we also detect an expansion of industry 4.0 into areas formerly occupied by managers. We observe that industry 4.0 has reached a mature state of development. More importantly, however, our validated framework for forecasting enabling technologies of innovation ecosystem emergence permits the identification and prediction of subsequent, complementary technologies.

Authors: Finn Jonas Tryggvason, Petra Nylund, Alexander Brem

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