Both, robotics/AI (RAI) and real-world labs (RWLs), are current topics in public innovation promotion policies, but are mostly treated in isolation. While RAI has a focus on a specific technology to serve society, RWLs address the institutional context including experimental learning of governments and societal perspectives. We are particularly interested in the interface between RAI and RWLs and the way media are reporting on these two domains. This reflects key aspects of the social debate in relation to RAI and RWLs. We base our analysis on the understanding that technology development and diffusion ultimately depend on institutional arrangements that are developed alongside or in lieu of market arrangements and also reflect societal needs. This paper uses quantitative text analysis to examine 3,800 German broadsheet newspaper articles in the period 2016-2023. We use Structural Topic Modeling (STM) with publication date and sub-corpus source as covariates to trace topic dynamics and topical prevalence contrast. We show that the dominant topic has changed over time from RAI ("Machine Learning and AI Development Methods") to RWL ("Real-World Labs for the Energy Transition"). We identify bridge topics and argue that these are diverse and include philosophical and legal considerations, public funding and specific application areas for robots, e.g. in schools. As indicators to identify the interface between the two domains (RAI, RWL), we propose a combination of topical prevalence contrast and eigenvector centrality and the use of psycholinguistic attributes to evaluate the topics. These elements could be broadly used to exploit possible complementarities for government experimental learning and when designing "smart regulation" which targets several fields simultaneously.

This contribution delves into the transformative effects of the Russian–Ukrainian war on the discourse surrounding German hydrogen. Employing structural topical modeling (STM) on a vast dataset of 2192 newspaper articles spanning from 2019 to 2022, it aims to uncover thematic shifts attributed to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The onset of the war in February 2022 triggered a significant pivot in the discourse, shifting it from sustainability and climate-change mitigation to the securing of energy supplies through new partnerships, particularly in response to Russia’s unreliability. Germany started exploring alternative energy trading partners like Canada and Australia, emphasizing green hydrogen development. The study illustrates how external shocks can expedite the uptake of new technologies. The adoption of the “H2 readiness” concept for LNG terminals contributes to the successful implementation of green hydrogen. In summary, the Russian–Ukrainian war profoundly impacted the German hydrogen discourse, shifting the focus from sustainability to energy supply security, underscoring the interconnectedness of energy security and sustainability in Germany’s hydrogen policy.

We study whether remote sensing (RS), a set of technologies with global reach and a variety of applications, can be considered instrumental to the provision of global public goods (GPG). We exploit text information from patent data and apply structural topic modeling to identify topics related (or relevant) to GPG provision, and trace their participation in the evolution of remote sensing technology over time. We develop a new indicator of affinity to GPG (and other themes) using meta information from our dataset. We find that, first, RS displays features of a general-purpose technology. Second, while peripheral, GPG-relevant topics are present in the RS topic space, and in some cases overlap with topics with high affinity in AI and participation of public sector actors in invention. With our analysis, we contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between the dynamics of technology and (global) political economy, a field of research yet under-explored.

The war in Ukraine and the looming threat of climate change are driving the strategic need to diversify sources of energy, including renewables. Therefore, the European Union aims to develop energy relations with non-EU member states, and Morocco has become a key priority. Both Brussels and Rabat are pursuing ambitious green policies and cooperation initiatives, including on hydrogen. Drawing on theories of international institutions and political economy, this article analyzes hydrogen-related relationship patterns and explains demand and supply factors as drivers of institutionalized energy cooperation. We examine the EU's hydrogen approach and development, its relations with Morocco, and the political interests of both sides. Our analysis shows that the complex interdependencies in the evolving EU-Morocco hydrogen relations indicate that demand can be met by supply. However, challenges remain, including the need to deepen the partnership and prepare the market for commercial hydrogen production.

This paper analyzes within a spatial endogenous growth setting the impact of public policy coordination on agglomeration. Governments in each of the two symmetric regions provide a local public input that becomes globally effective due to integration. Micro-foundation of governmental behavior is based on three different coordination schemes: autarky, full or partial coordination. Scale effects act as agglomeration force and in addition to private capital agglomeration increase the concentration of the public input. Integration promotes dispersion forces with respect to the distribution of physical capital which are based on decreasing private returns. However, within the governments' decision on the concentration of the public input, increasing integration reinforces agglomeration because it promotes the interregional productive use of the public input. Taking feedback effects between the private and the public sector into account leads to mutual reinforcement, hence agglomeration forces almost always dominate and the spreading equilibrium becomes unstable. If convergence is a separate (additional) political objective, it needs sustained additional political effort.

Taking robotic patents between 1977 and 2017 and building upon the topic modeling technique, we extract their latent topics, analyze how important these topics are over time, and how they are related to each other looking at how often they are recombined in the same patents. This allows us to differentiate between more and less important technological trends in robotics based on their stage of diffusion and position in the space of knowledge represented by a topic graph, where some topics appear isolated while others are highly interconnected. Furthermore, utilizing external reference texts that characterize service robots from a technical perspective, we propose and apply a novel approach to match the constructed topics to service robotics. The matching procedure is based on frequency and exclusivity of words overlapping between the patents and the reference texts. We identify around 20 topics belonging to service robotics. Our results corroborate earlier findings, but also provide novel insights on the content and stage of development of application areas in service robotics. With this study we contribute to a better understanding of the highly dynamic field of robotics as well as to new practices of utilizing the topic modeling approach, matching the resulting topics to external classifications and applying to them metrics from graph theory.

Identifying emerging technologies has been of long-standing interest to many scholars and practitioners. Previous studies have introduced methods to capture the concept of emergence from bibliographic records, including the recently proposed Technology Emergence Indicator (Carley et al. 2018). This indicator method has shown to be applicable to various technological fields. However, the indicator uses a limited time window, which can overlook the potential long-term evolution of emerging technologies. Moreover, the existing method suffers from interpretability, because it can be difficult to understand the context in which identified emerging terms are used. In this paper, we propose an improved version of the Technology Emergence Indicator that addresses these issues. In doing so, we examine emerging topics within the field of autonomous vehicles technologies during the period of 1991-2018, guided by a proposition about the long-term diffusion of an emerging technology topic. The results show that different autonomous vehicle technology topics emerge during each of the three 10-year periods under analysis, including an initial period of understanding the surrounding environment and path planning, a second period marked by DARPA Grand Challenge motivated factors associated with the urban environment and communication technologies, and a third period relating to machine learning and object detection. This association with certain emerging technology topics in each decade is also characterized by different trajectories of continued or cyclical carryover across the decades. The results suggest a methodology that practitioners can use in examining research areas to understand which topics are likely to persist into the future.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies (PatentSemTech 2019) co-located with the SEMANTiCS 2019 conference, held in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is a first in series of workshops that aims to establish a long-term collaboration and a two-way communication channel between the IP industry and academia from relevant fields to foster the usage of semantic technologies for answering research questions related to patent text mining and patent analytics as well as adopt them in working applications.

We present empirical evidence suggesting that technological progress in the digital age will be biased not only with respect to skills acquired through education but additionally with respect to non-cognitive skills (personality). We measure the direction of technological change by estimated future digitalization probabilities of occupations, and non-cognitive skills by the Big Five personality traits from four German worker surveys. Even though we control for education and work experience, we find that workers who are more open to experience, emotionally more stable and less agreeable will tend to be less susceptible to digitalization. We also find that future technological progress may not continue to hollow out the middle class as much as it did in the recent past. These results suggest that education and labor market policies should put more emphasis on children's and workers' personalities to strengthen their labor market resilience in the digital age.

We analyze within a spatial endogenous growth setting the impact of public policy coordination on regional inequality. Governments in each of the two symmetric regions provide a local public input that becomes globally effective due to integration. Micro-foundation of governmental behavior is based on three different coordination schemes: autarky, full or partial coordination. The size of the local public inputs - as measured by the expenditure share ratios - differs depending upon the extent to which the governments take interregional interdependencies and feedback effects into account. The resulting spatial distribution of economic activity is driven by integration, which acts as dispersion force, and scale effects, which act as concentration force. The latter are drivers of regional inequality. Given full symmetry, local externalities cancel w.r.t to their impact on spatial concentration. We show that coordination of public decisions that base on productivity considerations unequivocally foster concentration and destabilize the spreading equilibrium. Regional inequality is thus an optimal result or put differently, the convergence goal can only be met by applying additional arguments.

We analyze the interdependence between green attitude and equilibrium development of environmental quality in an endogenous growth model. Individuals take only part of their impact on pollution into account, hence there is a negative externality of capital accumulation on environmental quality. Increasing wealth or increasing pollution enhance green attitude and reduce the externality, because individuals care more about the environment if their income is higher or if pollution is more obvious. The time path of pollution as well as the evolution of equilibrium growth are shown to depend crucially on the determinants of green attitude. Ongoing growth may lead to complete internalization of the environmental externality if green attitude improves with increasing wealth, e.g. as a consequence of an increase in environmental education. In contrast, if green attitude is determined exclusively by the level of environmental quality, pollution remains at a suboptimally high level. The interdependence of wealth and pollution in the determination of environmental awareness implies more complex dynamics. Capital growth enhances green attitude and thereby decreases pollution. Improved environmental quality in turn may increase capital growth due to less green attitude and therefore slow down convergence to the sustainable balanced growth path.

Since the beginning of robotics, the substitution of human labor has been one of the crucial issues. The focus is on the economic perspective, asking how robotics affects the labor market, and on changes in the work processes of human workers. While there are already some lessons learnt from industrial robotics, the area of service robots has been analyzed to a much lesser extent. First insights into these aspects are of utmost relevance to technology assessment providing policy advice. As conclusions for service robots in general cannot be drawn, we identify criteria for the ex-ante evaluation of service robots in concrete application areas.

We analyse the link between internet use and foreign sourcing of services and materials inputs. In our empirical analysis using firm level data for Ireland we find, among firms that a priori all purchase inputs abroad, that those who commenced outsourcing from suppliers over the internet ("Adopters") experience significantly higher growth rates of services offshoring. This result shows in a variety of econometric methods (OLS, Propensity Scoring (Kernel, Nearest Neighbour and Caliper Matching)). Adopting the internet for outsourcing induced an increase in the share of foreign services by 3.2-4.0 per cent.

This paper analyzes the impact of different individual skills and their economy-wide distribution among heterogenous entrepreneurs on a country's catching up-process to the world technology frontier (WTF). Highly skilled entrepreneurs qualify as either technological specialists or as broadly skilled systemic entrepreneurs. Governmental policy may address individual skills or the aggregate composition of skills in society and may be interpreted as education policy. The effectiveness of alternative growth-promoting policies is shown to depend on the relationship between a country's state of development and the prevailing composition of entrepreneurs. Countries far from the WTF benefit from increasing the share of technological specialists, whereas countries close to the WTF benefit from increasing the share of broadly skilled systemic entrepreneurs. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper analyzes within a two-region endogenous growth model how different types of public policies affect the equilibrium spatial distribution of economic activity. Integration is modeled as a continuum and enables firms to access the public input of the respective other region. Given a dominance of agglomeration forces, multiple equilibria arise at which spreading becomes unstable and the stable equilibrium is characterized by a core-periphery structure. If only partial coordination of the two goverments decisions is realized, the positive productivity impact of one region s public input on the other region s marginal capital return becomes a positive externality. Then, the concentration of public inputs may end up to be suboptimally high or low, depending on the degree of scale effects. We perform numerical simulations to derive the equilibrium capital distribution and to disentangle the impact of the various determinants on equilibrium agglomeration.

In this article we analyze the interdependent issues of urbanization, growth, and globalization by presenting key empirical facts and relevant underlying economic theories on each. We look more closely, but without providing a detailed formal analysis, at a model by Baldwin and Forslid (2000) that combines a seminal model from the endogenous growth literature (Romer 1990) with one from the new economic geography literature (Krugman 1991). In the analysis the significance of a sophisticated consideration of the concept of integration is pointed out. We investigate the issue of scale, scale economies, and density and the important role integration plays in these considerations as well. We especially argue that future research should more precisely focus on integration as a dynamic concept that does not only affect agglomeration and growth, but which is itself the endogenous outcome of various interdependencies and which complements the institutional settings of the territories that are linked to each other.