Scientist in a lab coat, seen from behind, looks through glass at robotic production equipment.

If AI collapses the cost of making your product, the question is no longer how cheaply you can make it. It is what stops a competitor making the same thing. That...

Engineer seen from behind in a dark operations centre, watching one bright monitor among a curved bank of screens.

Capability is not what separates an attacker from a defender. Incentives are. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece of 24 August 2026 works this through in agentic cybersecurity, and the logic travels a...

Engineer seen from behind on a lit industrial steel staircase, landings receding above and below

Most boards plan around a single date. The patent expires, competitors arrive, the revenue line falls off a ledge. That model is tidy, it sits in the forecast, and for high-value...

Engineer in a hard hat walks past rows of high-voltage transformers in a large electrical equipment factory

When a market is about to triple in a decade, the patent filing map you drew for yesterday’s demand is the one that will let you down. A McKinsey analysis, written...

The most expensive failures in R&D are not the projects that fail. They are the projects that should never have started — and the ones that limp along because nobody had...

A dimly lit data centre corridor lined with illuminated server racks, a lone figure in silhouette standing among them.

July was a month about ownership. Not compliance, not litigation skill – ownership. Google’s edge sits on TPU technology that competitors must come back and license. Sanofi lost the mRNA product...

Technicians working on TPU cluster units in AI innovation data center with monitors and servers

When Berkshire Hathaway takes a $10 billion stake in Alphabet, the headline is the money. The real story is what Google chose not to monetise on its own. Google’s most valuable...

Appraiser seen from behind writing in a ledger beside an old hardcover book in a bright library workroom.

What happens when intellectual property built into your products turns out to belong to someone else? This week supplied three expensive answers. Each involved one of the world’s most powerful companies...

An engineer in a hi-vis vest looks down from a walkway at the lit concrete foundations of a construction site at dusk.

The most valuable intellectual property in your business is often not the product your customers see — it’s the platform underneath it: the data it learned from, the delivery technology it...

Book titled 'IP Playbook: Strategies for Intellectual Property' floating in space with galaxy and Earth in background

Ben Thompson’s recent Stratechery analysis is a masterclass in how scale, integration and narrative compound into something competitors can no longer touch. Starlink is profitable not because the satellites are clever,...