Cross-technology Innovation Trends and Evidence with Patent and Funding Data

Since at least Schumpeter’s theory of “new combinations”, innovation has often been viewed as the synthesis of disparate knowledge areas. Recent works have investigated cross-sector innovation, where the disparity between combined technologies may be substantial. However, even within one sector, such as technology, leveraging combinations of ideas, software, and hardware from different technological sub-fields can yield innovative results. We analyze two large datasets—2.3 million patents and nearly 34,000 venture capital investments—in order to provide new evidence for and analyze the trends of “cross-technology” innovation. Notably, we test the hypothesis that for a number of emerging technologies, cross-technology innovation is growing more rapidly than innovation isolated within single technological categories. Our study provides supporting evidence for existing theory on entrepreneurship and innovation, yet it also prompts questions about the rates at which cross-technology innovation is occurring, particularly for emerging technologies.