Emergence of notion "primitive business" in the era of Industry 4.0 and globalization
There surely is research about the complement(s) of the (low tech) &quot;primitive businesses&quot;, i.e. the high-tech and/or innovative businesses.
The US CES for instance publishes a BDS-HT (Business
Dynamics Statistics - High Tech) report. You can compare these with the core BDS data and get an idea how the high-tech sector differs. The US CES method of high-tech business classification is based on the number of STEM employees.

Ultimately, High Tech industries account for about 4% of firms and 6% of employment.


So there are a lot &quot;primitive businesses&quot; by this standard, even in the US.
A different method is used by CES for finding/reporting &quot;innovative firms&quot;, BDS-IF. This is based on patents (BDS-PF) and trademarks.
I'm guessing the German Industrie 4.0 that motivated your question is probably similar to BDS-HT, but I don't know their exact methodology.