Martin Kenney

The global automotive industry’s transformation from internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) to electric vehicles (EVs) represents a fundamental reordering of global value chains, industrial capabilities, and strategic influence. Technologies core to EVs (batteries and their components, motors and magnets, semiconductors, software) have broad applications in other industries, including energy production and defense.

China has emerged as the undisputed leader in EVs and their key components—batteries, semiconductors, software, and rare earth minerals. Its success stems from...

In a global economy defined by growing geoeconomic tensions, the platform economy has become a stage where international political and economic conflict unfolds. Aware of the power of platform firms and the risks of the platform economy, large economies are abandoning the dominant laissez faire approach in favor of strategies that differ dramatically as a function of political goals, domestic political coalitions, internal industrial structure, and available policy and market instruments. We examine the trajectories and strategies of the four largest economies: the US, the EU, China and...

Intensifying concerns about online platform firms’ rapid rise, expansion, and growing asymmetric power have attracted political scrutiny and undermined the legitimacy of a minimalist regulatory regime that is giving way to intense debate and increasingly interventionist governmental policies and enforcement actions. First, we view the rise of, and recent political responses to, the often-predatory power and manipulative conduct of platform firm in terms of a ‘Polanyian’ double movement in which the destabilising and destructive effects of unchecked corporate activities and market...

The new digital technologies offer remarkable opportunities to make agriculture more sustainable and contribute to the amelioration of inequality at the local and global level. And yet, digital innovations and, in particular, the adoption of platforms risk creating further distortions among and within countries. Digitalization could contribute to the further concentration of agriculture in a few giant firms and also lead to the rapid and unmanaged demise of subsistence farming as it is typically practiced in developing countries. Alternatively, if the implementation of the digital...