The Digital Innovation Race: Conceptualizing the Emerging New World Order

This book develops new theoretical perspectives on the economics and politics of innovation and knowledge in order to capture new trends in modern capitalism. It shows how giant corporations establish themselves as intellectual monopolies and how each of them builds and controls its own corporate innovation system. It presents an analysis of a new form of production where Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, and their counterparts in China, extract value and appropriate intellectual rents through privileged access to AI algorithms trained by data from organizations and individuals all around the world.

These companies’ specific form of production and rent-seeking takes place at the global level and challenges national governments trying to regulate intellectual monopolies and attempting to build stronger national innovation systems. It is within this context that the authors provide new insights on the complex interplay between corporate and national innovation systems by looking at the US-China conflict, understood as a struggle for global technological supremacy. The book ends with alternative scenarios of global governance and advances policy recommendations as well as calls for social activism.

This book will be of interest to students, academics and practitioners (both from national states and international organizations) and professionals working on innovation, digital capitalism and related topics.

Bengt-Åke Lundvall is Professor emeritus in economics at Department of Business Studies at Aalborg University and Professor emeritus at Department of Economic History at Lund University. His research is organized around a broad set of issues related to innovation systems and learning economies.

Cecilia Rikap is Lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London, CONICET researcher and associate researcher at COSTECH, Université de Technologie de Compiègne. She has a PhD in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research deals with the global political economy of science, technology and innovation.