Growing Technological Relatedness to the ICT Industry and Its Impacts

We create an intersectoral citation network using 1.3 million patents granted between 1981 and 2010 across all industries in the United States. In this network space, we find a significant increase over time in the proximity of non–information and communication technologies (ICT) industries to the ICT industry. Such “ICT-closeness” of an industry relates to a significant increase in the proportion of ICT technologies in the industry’s patent portfolio and complementarity between ICT and non-ICT patents in its portfolio. We hypothesize and find that ICT-Closeness has a significant positive impact on innovation outcomes of the citing industry, including innovative efficiency, recombinant capabilities, and creation of new products, services, and business methods. ICT-closeness also engenders hypercompetition in the citing industries, as reflected in greater winner-take-all dynamics and turbulence. Our results point to a paradigm shift in knowledge production, and in turn, sources of competitive value across diverse industries.

History: Ravi Bapna, Senior Editor; Sunil Wattal, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2020.0627.