International comparison of cross-disciplinary integration in industry 4.0: A co-authorship analysis using academic literature databases

In innovation strategy, a type of Schumpeterian competitive strategy in
business administration, "intra-individual diversity" has
attracted attention as one factor for creating innovation. In this study,
we redefine "framework for identifying researchers' areas of
expertise" as "a framework for quantifying intra-individual
diversity among researchers. Note that diversity here refers to authorship
of articles in multiple research fields. The application of this framework
then made it possible to visualize organizational diversity by
accumulating the intra-individual diversity of researchers and to discuss
the innovation strategy of the organization. The analysis in this study
discusses how countries are promoting research on the topics of artificial
intelligence (AI), big data, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies,
which are at the core of Industry 4.0, from an innovation perspective.
Note that Industry 4.0 is a technological framework that aims to “improve
the efficiency of all social systems,” “create new industries,” and
“increase intellectual productivity.”  For the analysis, we used
19-year bibliographic data (2000–2018) from the top 20 countries in terms
of the number of papers in AI, big data, and IoT technologies. As the
results, this study classified the styles of cross-disciplinary fusion
into four patterns in AI and three patterns in big data. This study did
not consider the results in IoT because of only small differences between
countries. Furthermore, regional differences in the style of
cross-disciplinary fusion were also observed, and the global innovation
patterns in Industry 4.0 were classified into seven categories. In Europe
and North America, the cross-disciplinary integration style was similar to
that between the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, England,
Italy, Canada, and France. In Asia, the cross-disciplinary fusion style
was similar between China, Japan, and South Korea.