Does the future of Industry 4.0 lie in betweenness centrality? A structural network analysis of The Republic of Korea’s patent citation maps for the green industry

Abstract

Do emerging industrial nations have little hope in the face of the new technological revolution 4.0, given the powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms characteristic of the innovation systems in central regions? Or can socio-technical trajectories, initially emerging as niches but later evolving into sectors or even networks, pave the way for technological leapfrogging in these emerging countries? If so, can we envision specific techno-industrial policies to facilitate these leaps, and more importantly, can we develop specific tools and methods to diagnose and promote such policies?This paper aims to contribute to the improvement and application of a Structural Network Analysis (SNA) methodology to identify, within a large set of longitudinal patent data, in a subdomain of industry 4.0 (namely, green technologies), the most promising technological domains for a given country under study (South Korea).The interest of this perspective on technological economic policies is to target a technological domain that is both critical and stimulating enough to generate a network effect, yet sufficiently niche to not require capital beyond the capacity of an emerging nation.In the current state of our intermediate research results, the findings are only partially satisfactory. The results regarding the most promising technologies appear significant only half of the time (whereas in the reference study, they tend towards 100%). Nevertheless, many avenues for improvement in research remain open.JEL classification: 030.