近年来，全球范围的技术发展面临新的挑战，一方面是专利、论文等的数量持续快速增长；另一方面，技术发展趋向于局部改进和渐进创新，少见原创性的技术创新，这实质上是技术领域的内卷化。面对技术内卷的涌现蔓延，开展研究工作的前提是对其进行科学测度。为科学测度技术内卷，避免专利数量的过快增长干扰研究，从专利类别分析入手开展研究；将发明专利划分为基本专利和同族专利，同族专利是围绕基本专利衍生形成的，反映领域技术的细微改进和渐进创新；选择同族专利为突破口，研究构建测度内卷的技术内卷指数。然后，以化学电池技术为研究样本，针对长周期的技术发展过程，运用研究构建的技术内卷指数，定量测度和划分技术内卷的演进阶段，分析得出技术内卷的阶段特征。
Abstract
The global technology development is facing stagflation in recent years. On the one hand, the number of patents and theses increases rapidly. On the other hand, there is a lack of original innovations and technology development tends to partial improvement and incremental innovation. This is essentially caused by the involution in technology field. Involution is a phenomenon that is limited by the original model. The development tends to be internalization and refinement due to difficulty in expanding system boundary. The research of involution began in agricultural field. Researchers adopted the sociological paradigm and obtained enlightening results. Technological involution is a phenomenon that technology development tends to be partial improvement and incremental innovation under competitive pressure in the context of a long-term lack of technological breakthroughs. It is a challenge to analyze the emerging phenomenon of technological involution. Faced with the spread of technological involution, it is necessary to carry out targeted research to measure technological involution.
With the technology development falling into involution, the modified innovations emerged and led to the number of patents increasing continuously. It is difficult to analyze the patent time series with the logistic curve model. Patent family is contributor to the rapid growth of patents. Patents include basic patent and patent family. Basic patent is independent of other patents and it represents the substantive progress of technology. Patent family is a collection of patent applications covering the same or similar technical content. The quality of patent family is generally lower than that of basic patent. Patent family represents incremental improvement of original technology, and it is the key to analyze technological involution. Therefore, we construct technological involution index (TII) based on patent family to analyze technological involution in target field. The numerator is the sum of simple patent family and extended patent family. The denominator is the number of the patent for invention. The higher the TII is, the higher the degree of technological involution is. It indicates that the technology development tends to be partial improvement and incremental innovation, and patent family dominates the growth of patent.
We select chemical battery technology as a sample and utilize the TII to analyze the long-term process of the technological involution. Chemical battery technology is an important field, which is widely applied in electric vehicles, energy storage, mobile devices, etc. Lithium battery became the mainstream of chemical battery after the rechargeable battery technology appeared in 1976. However, there is lack of principle breakthrough in lithium battery technology since its commercial application in 1991. The chemical battery technology developed slowly in recent decades, while the number of patents continues increasing. We obtain patent time series in chemical battery field from 1980 to 2018. The TII shows that the technological involution presents an increasing trend in the field. We utilize K-means cluster method to analyze the evolution stage and reveal the stage features. The results show that technological involution goes through a long-term process of dynamic evolution, including low involution stage, acceleration involution stage and high involution stage. The low involution stage lasted from 1980 to 2000. The TII gradually increased to 0.825 in the acceleration involution stage from 2000 to 2011. The high involution stage started from 2012, the TII continued increasing and gradually reached its peak. Patent family accounted for 86.8% while basic patent accounted for 13.2% of the whole patents in 2018. In the high involution stage, technology development tended to be partial improvement around basic patents. The energy density of chemical battery improved slowly, and it is necessary to seek for technological breakthroughs.
Faced with the challenge of technological involution, it is feasible to utilize the TII to monitor the trend of technological innovation. The stagnation of technical principle is the inducement of technological involution. We should break the path dependence of incremental innovation in the field in high involution and seek for technological breakthroughs to achieve the target of breaking involution. Patents are widely employed as basis for science and technology evaluation. However, the proportion of patent family significantly exceeds that of basic patents in the field in high involution. Patent family is derivative of basic patent and the quality is lower than basic patent. Therefore, we should prevent the interference of excessive growth of patent family on science and technology evaluation, and reduce the weight of patent family when evaluating technology in high involution.
关键词
技术内卷 /
同族专利 /
内卷指数 /
演进分析
Key words
technological involution /
patent family /
involution index /
evolution analysis
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基金
国家自然科学基金项目：“专利国际化背景下的专利战及防范应对研究”（72074042, 2021.01—2024.12）；辽宁省社会科学规划基金项目：“专精特新‘小巨人’的专利支撑体系及构建策略研究”（L21ZD037, 2022.01—2023.12）。
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