Description
The concentration of intangible assets within the digital economy has been mostly studied by focusing on platforms, in particular, tech giants. These companies harvest big data and process them with secretly kept algorithms. The resulting digital intelligence informs their ongoing businesses and opens new avenues of innovation. Given the potentially never-ending innovations that this process triggers, big tech companies have been conceptualized as data-driven intellectual monopolies. In this presentation, I will argue that BlackRock is also concentrating data and algorithms, therefore digital intelligence, thus eventually becoming a data-driven intellectual monopoly. BlackRock’s Aladdin platform has become indispensable for asset management. It bases its recommendations and analysis on processing data compiled over the last 50 years ranging from financial data to any type of event that may affect capital markets anywhere in the world. From the millions and millions of correlations, it detects possible future scenarios and suggests investments to avoid adverse scenarios. To provide evidence of the relevance of Aladdin and more broadly of intangible assets for BlackRock’s business, I perform a text mining analysis of the company’s annual reports for the last 10 years, analysing the context of appearance and the increasing relevance of terms like ‘Aladdin’, ‘innovation’ and data (‘data analytics’, ‘data processing’, etc.). This is complemented with an overview of BlackRock’s intangible assets over time as well as by looking at BlackRock’s “Technology services” business results in relation to its overall business.
