ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent growth of scientific and technological research to fight it presents challenges for researchers who need to monitor the knowledge produced on this theme. Among these support technologies are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications. This article presents a technology prospection to describe the technology landscape of AI applications in the fight against COVID-19. The study analyzed 350 patent families, which were organized into technology categories. The findings demonstrated a prevalence of patent filings from India, China, and the United States. Collaboration between countries and innovation organizations was not evident, unlike what was observed in academic collaborations in previous studies. There was a predominance of technologies in the areas of computing and medicine, that is, ICTs adapted for the treatment or processing of medical data with focus on identification, triage, diagnosis, and prediction of new outbreaks of the epidemic.

Several studies about knowledge transfer in multinational corporations have found that the process is influenced by factors such as absorptive capacity, tacit knowledge and power relations, all of which impact knowledge sharing strategies between corporate headquarters and foreign subsidiaries. A multiple case study of Brazilian subsidiaries of three multinational corporations using in-depth interviews, based on a conceptual model consisting of four propositions, was conducted to identify factors linked to the knowledge transfer process and to assess their influence on that transfer. The first proposition tries to assess explicit knowledge, primarily through the use of IT tools; the second analyzes the role of the subsidiary within the corporate network and how it influences the degree of knowledge sharing. The third assesses the influence of subsidiary absorptive capacity and the fourth analyzes the impact of worker exchange programs on knowledge sharing between headquarters and foreign subsidiaries. Study results confirm the four propositions and enable the identification of relationships between factors, especially explicit knowledge and worker expatriation as complementary factors in knowledge transfer strategies.