Breakthrough technologies of social transformations: devising an identification methodology

The object of this study is the breakthrough technologies of Industry 4.0, which are driving social transformations. Such a focus of research is due to the fact that under current conditions, all domains of society are undergoing transformation, the source of which is the accelerated development of equipment and technology. Innovation cycles generate inventions and open up new possibilities, but this is not always obvious to economic actors. The need arises to design a toolkit that would allow early identification of new trends in social transformations and form appropriate business models and economic policy directions for them. This paper reports a methodological approach to identifying breakthrough technologies that drive the development of social transformations. It is based on the use of special indicators of bibliographic databases and information from social networks – platforms where the communication among researchers takes place. The specificity of the approach is the combination of bibliometric monitoring on a new, expanded database of sources with statistical analysis. The latter involved assessing the time series using the growth rate of publications and establishing a threshold value using the standard deviation method. The prognostic capabilities of such an approach have been demonstrated on the example of identifying breakthrough technologies within Industry 4.0, which enabled the formation of a cluster of 7 technologies, which drive the deployment of a new technological paradigm. Focusing on these technologies could allow firms to improve business models and the state to concentrate resources on points of technological growth, thereby increasing the effectiveness of innovation policy