Technology
Patent Wars: Who is Winning the Battle for Tech Innovation Supremacy?
Patent Wars: The Battle for Tech Innovation
In the technology industry, the imperative to innovate is never-ending.
After all, the speed of technological change is exponential – and if a company like Microsoft or Google misses one important trend, it can drastically alter the direction of future prospects.
For the above reasons, both tech giants and unicorns are laser-focused on hiring the best engineering talent available, and deploying it to come up with the new innovations, business models, and game-changing products that they feel comfortable betting their futures on.
The Patent War Visualized
Today’s interactive visualization comes to us from The UK Domain, and it shows the amount of patents won by tech giants as well as unicorn startups.
Specifically, it pulls data from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, categorizing hundreds of thousands of patents by company, technology, and even CEO.
While the data is quite comprehensive, it’s also worth noting that recent years of data may be incomplete because there is up to an 18-month lag between patent registration and those patents becoming public.
Who’s Winning the Battle?
Here is a look solely at the quantity of patents awarded over recent years:
Interestingly, the list tends to skew towards companies with a hardware focus, even though many of their software counterparts are larger in terms of market capitalization.
For example, Samsung has 138,934 patents registered, which is more than Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and Netflix combined.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. – better known as Foxconn – is also one of the highest-ranking companies on the list with 25,356 patents, about the same amount as its partner company Apple.
Unicorn Lightweights
Unicorns, which are startups valued at over $1 billion, also have a tough time competing with the tech giants on the patent front.
Note: it looks like the source has included both public and private companies on this “unicorn” list
Many unicorns are newer companies, which means that the 18-month lag in patents entering the public domain may have a considerable effect on totals.
Still, it’s amazing to see that companies like Uber and Lyft – two competitors that have confidentially filed to go public in 2019 – have fewer than 200 patents between them.
Even if you combine all patents by the companies on the above chart, it works out to roughly 1,000 registered patents. To put that in perspective, that’s not even equal to 1% of Samsung’s gigantic total.
Technology
Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI
We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.
Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.
In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.
Data and Methodology
To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.
With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.
Department | Large impact (%) | Small impact (%) | No impact (%) |
---|---|---|---|
IT | 73 | 26 | 1 |
Finance | 70 | 21 | 9 |
Customer Sales | 67 | 16 | 17 |
Operations | 65 | 18 | 17 |
HR | 57 | 41 | 2 |
Marketing | 56 | 41 | 3 |
Legal | 46 | 50 | 4 |
Supply Chain | 43 | 18 | 39 |
In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.
Where AI will make the biggest impact
Jobs in infogramtion technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.
Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.
Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.
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