The quality of information: High-tech supply and low-tech command

Can the seventeenth-century publishing business or the nineteenth-century wine trade tell us much about twenty-first century high-tech supply chains? In this talk, I will suggest that each of these commercial sectors faced problematic questions about the quality of information in disaggregated supply chains and each came up with surprisingly similar solutions. A comparison suggests that as vertically integrated organizations come under attack, “vertical competition” may become a particularly salient feature of the high-tech landscape, and that while much attention has focused on the role of copyrights and patents in this landscape, trademarks may turn out to be the more influential branch of the IP triad.

Presenter(s)

Paul Duguid is adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley and professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. His current research interests include the history and development of trademarks.

A more complete bio can found at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~duguid/.