The Over-Concentration of Innovation and Firm-Specific Knowledge in the Artificial Intelligence Industry

Pedro Jácome de Moura (), Carlos Denner Santos Junior (), Carlo Gabriel Porto-Bellini () and José Jorge Lima Dias Junior ()
Additional contact information
Pedro Jácome de Moura: UFPB
Carlos Denner Santos Junior: UnB
Carlo Gabriel Porto-Bellini: UFPB
José Jorge Lima Dias Junior: UFPB

Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 2024, vol. 15, issue 4, No 185, 20547-20577

Abstract: Abstract The development of the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has been impressive in virtually all economic sectors in recent years. Our study discusses the over-concentration of AI knowledge (OCAIK) as the origin of dominance over the global AI industry by a small number of companies and universities that deploy the needed resources to develop and use cutting edge, inimitable AI knowledge. Business agents appropriate AI-related scholarly research and absorb research findings that grant them increasingly inimitable competitive advantages over new entrants. Our study verifies the occurrence of OCAIK by processing thousands of papers presented in AI conferences from 2013 to 2022. To analyze our hypotheses, we used classification techniques and inferential statistics. We found a significant difference between clusters of companies that we called ordinary investors and outlier investors. We also observed the influence of universities in the correlation between OCAIK and investments made in both research and development (R&D) and capital goods. Our findings indicate a strong collaboration between AI leading companies and universities in generating firm-specific AI knowledge. We additionally offer novel insights on the resource-based view (RBV) and the knowledge-based view (KBV) research traditions, in that business competition may reach a point of no return if only incremental innovation is devised instead of radical innovation to break the chains of knowledge accumulation and technological implementation by a strict number of agents.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Competitive advantage; Research and development; Knowledge-based view; Oligopolies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13132-024-01974-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jknowl:v:15:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s13132-024-01974-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13132

DOI: 10.1007/s13132-024-01974-1

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Knowledge Economy is currently edited by Elias G. Carayannis

More articles in Journal of the Knowledge Economy from Springer, Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().