The authors provide evidence that COVID-19 shifted the direction of innovation toward new technologies that support video conferencing, telecommuting, remote interactivity, and working from home (collectively, WFH).
By parsing automated readings of the subject matter content of US patent applications, the authors find clear evidence that patents for WFH technologies are advancing at an accelerated rate. The accompanying figure reports the percentage of newly filed patent applications that support WFH technologies at a monthly frequency from January 2010 through May 2020. Interestingly, the WFH share of new patent applications rises from 0.53% in January 2020 to 0.77% in February, before the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic. China reported the first death from COVID-19 in early January and imposed a lockdown in Wuhan on January 23, 2020. By the end of January, the virus had spread to many other countries, including the United States. This figure suggests that these developments had already—by February—triggered the beginnings of a shift in new patent applications toward technologies that support WFH.
By March, COVID-19 cases and deaths had exploded in many localities and countries around the world. As the figure illustrates, the WFH percentage of new patent applications from March to May are nearly twice as large as the January value, providing clear evidence for the authors that COVID-19 has shifted the direction of innovation toward technologies that support WFH.
