The expansionary strategies of intellectual monopolies: Google and the digitalization of healthcare

Abstract As big tech companies are entering new industrial sectors, an open question concerns the drivers of their expansionary strategies. This paper proposes that these companies are currently entering sectors based on their data-driven intellectual monopoly power, thereby complementing the preliminary answer provided by political economy research which has argued that expansion is driven by their infrastructural power. This approach is developed through a historical analysis of tech giants as companies that systematically turn knowledge and data into intangible assets, showing their expansionary strategies in the healthcare sector to be mainly driven by insights obtained from those intangible assets (a monopolized intangibles driver) and by a quest for conquering new knowledge and data to perpetuate their intellectual monopolies (an intangibles prospecting driver). The paper further illustrates its arguments through a case study of Google’s expansionary strategy and its prioritized incursion into healthcare.