In May 2024, the Saint Pierre International Security Center (SPCIS) launched the “Global Tech Policy at the Forefront” series, featuring conversations with leading experts on the impact of emerging technologies—such as AI, blockchain, biometrics, and robotics—on global governance and public policy.
On November 14th, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Cecilia Rikap. Professor Rikap is now the Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). She is also a tenure researcher at CONICET, Argentina’s national research council, and an associate researcher at the COSTECH lab at Université de Technologie de Compiègne.
Professor Rikap’s research focuses on the global impact of intellectual monopolies, especially in the digital and pharmaceutical industries. She explores how these monopolies concentrate intangible assets, shape the distribution of profits, and fuel geopolitical tensions. She has written extensively on these topics, including two well-known books: Capitalism, Power and Innovation (winner of the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize) and The Digital Innovation Race (co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall). Her current work examines how tech giants are taking on state-like roles and their growing influence on global production, innovation, and knowledge systems.
Our interview with Professor Cecilia Rikap covers a broad range of topics related to the political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. It is divided into two parts. In this first part, she shares her deep insights on “intellectual monopolies” and their impact on knowledge commons and innovation.
Meaning of “Intellectual Monopolies”
Dr. Naikang Feng: Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Rikap! It’s a great pleasure to have you here. I came across your work through your Crash Course on Big Tech, techno-feudalism, and democracy. I also read a few chapters of your book about intellectual monopoly and the digital innovation race. To start, could you explain what you mean by "intellectual monopolies"?
Prof. Cecilia Rikap: I want to expand the definition of a monopoly, because today we tend to accept that it just refers to a market with only one supplier. Monopolies as a power relation comprise both those enjoying and those deprived from what has been monopolized. In fact, this was the medieval understanding of a monopoly. The definition provided by Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General for England and Wales by the early 17th century, stressed not only the power to exclude or deprive others but also the existence of different types of exclusion according to whether the monopoly was exercised in the buying, selling, making, working, or using.
So, all else equal, firms that have already innovated are more likely to keep innovating anew before others by relying on their previous successes and capabilities as well as by using their resulting financial leeway. This accelerated innovation rate renders successful innovators potentially unreachable—at least while they keep innovating—engendering a sustained intellectual monopoly.
Intellectual monopolies are thus organizations that systematically turn intangibles (knowledge, data, narratives) into their assets, thus using them for accumulating at the expense of society. In principle, knowledge could be simultaneously mobilized by many without detriment to either party. And we build knowledge on the basis of existing knowledge—even when criticizing others’ ideas, we rely on knowledge to produce knowledge. Knowledge is, thus, both input and output. If only a few can freely access the necessary input, future output will be compromised.
This is what happens with intellectual monopolies: they control not only existing knowledge in a field or industry but also the chances to produce knowledge in the future. By keeping others from freely accessing their controlled knowledge—whether by keeping it secret, protecting it with IPRs, or innovating at a speed too fast for others to catch up—they prevent society from accessing the necessary inputs to develop new knowledge.
The Mechanics of Intellectual Monopolies
Dr. Naikang Feng: That’s fascinating. Could you elaborate on how intellectual monopolies enforce and benefit from their control over knowledge and innovation?
Prof. Cecilia Rikap: What they monopolize is access to intangibles, and thus the capacity to freely produce other things with those intangibles—including the production of other intangibles. For instance, if you want to do research and that requires accessing a patented molecule, for that new R&D process you need to pay a royalty. And if are the company producing the treatment or drug whose active principle is that patented molecule, you also have to pay a fee to the big pharma that has encapsulated that knowledge.
In this example, inside the global value chain control by the pharmaceutical company, you will have to accept the prices dictated by that company because it is the pharma company that controls the indispensable and irreplaceable part of the production chain.
The Widening Gap in Innovation
Dr. Naikang Feng: How does this sustained innovation advantage affect competition and the broader economy?
Prof. Cecilia Rikap: Putting this sketch in motion, the gap between the intellectual monopoly and the rest of the firms producing the same or similar products will progressively widen. The latter remains structurally behind, and their chances to imitate further shrink over time.
The less a firm learns and innovates, the less it will know how to do it. Learning can be hampered to the point where awareness of the existence of a new technique would not be enough for adoption, even without Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). Without the necessary capabilities and resources for developing or using techniques, accessing them will not alter things. The result is more economic concentration but not necessarily under the form of a monopolistic market. The structures that we see are usually composed of a stable core with turbulent peripheries. And the core can be a single firm or more than one each systematically monopolizing (capturing and profiting from) intangibles.
In fact, intellectual monopolies use their monopolized intangibles to plan spheres of global capitalism even without ownership. These spheres of control include multiple structures, such as global value chains and platforms, and also what I defined with Prof. Lundvall as a “corporate innovation system”.
Corporate Innovation Systems
Dr. Naikang Feng: You’ve mentioned “corporate innovation systems.” How do these differ from traditional monopolistic practices?
Prof. Cecilia Rikap: This is a key difference when we compare old intellectual monopolies, like IBM, and today’s intellectual monopolies, like Big Pharma, Big Tech, and large agrochemical companies.
While IBM mostly conducted R&D in-house, today’s intellectual monopolies control large networks of co-production of intangibles. They can outsource selected pieces of their R&D processes and of the crafting of narratives (think of the outsourcing of brand building to marketing agencies and the role of think tanks funded by Big Tech in the establishment of techno-solutionist narratives, including the idea of an AI race) to organizations from around the world.
A corporate innovation system is thus a system in which the R&D orientations are set by the intellectual monopoly, and most of the profits are captured by the intellectual monopoly—even if those monopolized intangibles were co-produced with thousands of other actors, such as universities, start-ups, and public research organizations.
The corporate innovation system forms a turbulent periphery of actors that contribute to knowledge production, take most of the economic risks, but barely profit from the outcomes.
For more on the history of the emergence of intellectual monopolies in different industries, I suggest reading my NLR piece that was translated into Chinese too. It examines the institutional, legal, political, and technological transformations that have led to their development, from early corporate control over workplace knowledge to today’s stringent global IPR regimes.
Here’s the link to the original in English: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii139/articles/capitalism-as-usual.
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