MIT News August 2, 2021
Researchers at MIT have provided predicted yearly performance improvement rates for nearly all definable technologies by creating a correspondence of all patents within the US patent system to a set of 1757 technology domains. A technology domain is a body of patented inventions achieving the same technological function using the same knowledge and scientific principles. The domains contain 97.2% of all patents within the entire US patent system. From the identified patent sets, they calculated the average centrality of the patents in each domain to predict their improvement rates, following a patent network-based methodology tested in prior work. 80% of technologies improve at less than 25% per year. Fast improving domains are concentrated in a few technological areas. The domains that show improvement rates greater than the predicted rate for integrated chips, from Moore’s law, are predominantly based upon software and algorithms. The rates of improvement were not a strong function of the patent set size…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Caption: Distribution of predicted improvement rates (in percent per year) for all 1,757 technology domains… Credit: the researchers