Between the Titans

by Riko Radojcic

This is a story of a regular immigrant engineer, encumbered with the fears and experiences from his old country, fending off large corporate entities pressuring him to sell a patent. And a story of employees of these large corporate entities graduating from the carrot to the stick approach. He feels that he cannot sell a patent for moral and sentimental reasons. They feel that they have to push the boundaries in order to achieve a win. The collision between the different personalities, with their conflicting intentions and worldviews, results in a series of unforeseen and unintended consequences that follow the interactions from California to Montenegro and back. A murder in Montenegro brings the story to a head ... Theme Standard management practice is to encourage team spirit and employee loyalty to the company. However, this often breeds the us-versus-them mentality, which could tempt some employees to go beyond the usual norms in order to ensure a victory for their corporate family. The temptation may be especially acute when the stakes are such as a corporate life or death situation. In such circumstances, some employees could be tempted to use unethical, immoral, or even illegal means to score a win for their team. The high-profile legal war between Apple and Qualcomm that has dominated the tech-industry headlines between 2017 and 2019 serves as a backdrop for this fictional story. It was a situation with many billions of dollars at an environment suitable for exploring the psychology of perfectly good people losing their moral compasses in order to achieve a corporate win. And it was also a case that emphasized the very important role that Intellectual Property plays in high-tech industry, and by extension, in modern life so dependent on devices like the ubiquitous smartphones.

290 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2020

About the author

Riko Radojcic writes hard-science technothriller stories that blur the lines between the real and the imagined. The 'real' part is based on his 30+ years of experience in the high-tech industry, and the 'imagined' part are just stories that he made up - but that could happen. His books are a blend of fiction, with characters that make sense, dealing with the non-fictional realities of the semiconductor industry, with some real-world technological considerations and with current events all mixed in to make thrilling hard-to-put-down dramas.

Riko was born in what was then Yugoslavia, spent his teen years in East Pakistan (Bangladesh now), Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, completed high school in a Switzerland, and then earned his BSc and PhD degrees in Electronic Engineering and Solid-State Physics in England. He enjoyed a rewarding and a very stimulating career in semiconductor industry, acting in a variety of technical, managerial and business development roles and working with a variety of talented people from all over the world.

And now he is a writer, trying to bring to life his very diverse experiences through fictional stories.