ABSTRACT
This chapter inquires on the inception of new global leaders under intellectual monopoly capitalism. Existing global intellectual monopolies predate knowledge from their innovation networks that are transformed into intangible assets, narrowing-down windows of opportunity for other firms catching-up or leapfrogging. Nevertheless, we argue that a Chinese state-own enterprise, State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), overcame this limitation by heavily relying on local – particularly public-organizations to become an intellectual monopoly in technologies that had not been previously monopolized, in particular Ultra High Voltage (UHV) and smart grids. We show that SGCC first became a national intellectual monopoly and only then expanded that monopoly beyond China. We empirically study this transition by proxying SGCC’s innovation networks proxied by building network maps using its publications’ data. These networks evolved from mostly national towards increasingly including foreign collaborators. By comparing publications with SGCC’s patent portfolio ownership structure, we also contribute to thinking that SGCC is garnering intellectual rents from its increasingly transnational innovation networks by leveraging on its national innovation system.
