ABSTRACT
Amazon is the absolute winner of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, even before, it was already a paradigmatic example of a data-driven intellectual monopoly. This chapter focuses on the content of its patents as well as its overall innovation networks. The chapter uses Amazon’s case to illustrate how intellectual monopolies alternatively organize and control global production networks or value chains and platforms. These are particular structures within their set of available organizational and knowledge management alternatives. This chapter also complements our analysis of intellectual monopoly power by relating it to other sources of power that Amazon mobilizes to strengthen its intangible assets’ dominance, in particular its political power. Finally, picking up the general discussion on the interplay between states and intellectual monopolies introduced in Chapter 4, we end with a discussion on the clashes of power between Amazon, the United States, and the Chinese state.
