Working from home will outlast the pandemic—at least, that’s what US patent applications suggest. The lockdowns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic set off a significant shift in new patent applications toward technologies that support working remotely, according to Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis, and Booth PhD candidate Yulia Zhestkova.
The researchers parsed the text of US patent applications to spot any trends in innovation related to working from home. Through a review of news articles, they built a dictionary of relevant terms and phrases including telework, video conferencing, telecommuting, flexible workplace, distance work, virtual office, nomadic employee, and working from anywhere. They then created an algorithm to analyze the more than 3.5 million patent applications filed from January 7, 2010, through September 3, 2020.
If a patent application included at least one relevant term in its description or main-features section, the researchers marked the application as a working from home (WFH) invention.
WFH-related patent filings began rising in 2020, just a few weeks after Chinese authorities imposed a lockdown in Wuhan to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, Bloom, Davis, and Zhestkova find. As the virus began to spread across the United States, patent filings referencing the key terms surged. The share of patent applications related to advancements in remote work rose from 0.53 percent in January to 0.74 percent in February to 1.07 percent in July.