Abstract
Corporate power in the 21st century relies on the predatory concentration of knowledge, information and narratives. Leaders are intellectual monopolies. In this presentation, I distinguish Amazon, Microsoft and Google from all the other corporations exercising intellectual monopolies. Combining 112 interviews at the world’s largest firms with data on corporate venture capital, acquisitions, open source, AI conference presentations and patents, I show that those three giants control the network of organizations developing AI and the cloud. Because these technologies became indispensable for exercising corporate power, leaders from the most diverse industries became technologically dependent. Disney, L’Oréal, McDonalds, Nestlé, Nike, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Siemens, Toyota, Visa, Walmart, Netflix, Uber and many more use data and AI running on Big Tech clouds for scientific research and branding, for planning production, create demand and control workers inside their supply chains.
Meeting ID: 639 6963 0985
Passcode: 840612
About Cecilia Rikap
Cecilia Rikap (PhD in Economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Her research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. Read more about her here.
Thomas Hoholm (Head of Department - Department of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, BI Norwegian Business School) will comment, and Chantale Tippett (Doctoral Research Fellow at TIK) will moderate the seminar. Read more about them here and here.