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

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.