Resumo

When we talk about autonomous cars, we cannot account the enormous amount of changes that must overcome with the Schumpeterian “creative destruction” induced by a “disruptive” platform. We believe in certain kind of innovation, because goes from vehicles driven by people to partially or completely autonomous, or from internal combustion engine to hybrid or electrical. Perhaps from the labor perspective certain classes of workers will categorize this change as “creative destruction”, other classes could categorize it as “creative construction”. We are not searching for that dichotomy.

Apart from technical and social changes needed for the transformation, we have also see that the organizations individually do are only part of the change. This game will also be disputed in the field level. On the field level, we will find a multiplexed network of interests and self-preservation. The innovation platform will not be a pure conception in any sense, but socially skilled actors will mediate the conception among other actors. Them, what is this platform, a real “disruptive” or some sort of evolution? How the actors arrangement affect and are affected by this change?

The theoretical lenses considered to the results interpretation is the field theory from the perspective of Fligstein e McAdam (2012) and Bourdieu (2011). Both theories have differences in their construction, the assumptions of action is one of them. But we see complementarities in certain perspectives. The action conceived by Fligstein e McAdam (2012) is constructed over the idea of skilled social actor. Going in this way, the skilled social actor can take simbolic and material advantages. For Bourdieu (2011) the domination of a field is related to the hability to leverage capitals.

We considered two major longitudinal data sources covering the period from 1995 to 2016; (1) the annual report from JAMA- 1998 to 2016; and (2) the Derwent World Patents Index – 1995 to 2016, which includes data about intellectual property of automakers. We have found about 1,300 contractual ties among JAMA automakers, and also involving the same set of automakers, we mapped circa 7211 tetradic patent applications related to the B60 categories of automobile that covers the complete set of automobile technologies. The networks where constructed to evaluate nodal and global metrics.

To accomplish our objective we used two SCC (Strong Connected Components) analytical corpus, (1) the Production field through contractual ties, (2) the R&D field through patents’ co-assignment and (3) semantic analysis of Toyota, Google and Apple patents absttracts, all 3 objectives with data from 1995 to 2016. The longitudinal approach is important to identify changes and its nature at strategic action field.

Evidence demonstrates that hierarchical group formation in a SCC are evidence of the strategical action of the automakers to stabilize the Japanese production field. In both fields, this was achieved through the Betweeness among powerful actors and its groups. Another important find in this research is a clear distinction between the Japanese automakers and the others automakers – USA, EC and CH –, the relational strategy based on intermediatino distinguishes them. Finally, the ICT actors and automakers are creating an architectural platform of innovation.

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