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Case Study: Will Our Chinese Partner Copy Our Technology?

Harvard Business Review

While Blue Sky is an SOE, I think they really want to differentiate themselves, and they're willing to use a lot of our technology.". The only person not applauding was Wang Xiguo, the engineer who had led the development of Prime's power train technology. The workers standing near him applauded. Entering the IP Badlands.

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What Tesla Knows That Other Patent-Holders Don’t

Harvard Business Review

Rather than worrying about car companies copying their technology, Tesla now hopes they will do so, in order to expand the overall market for electric vehicles. A Tesla vehicle is quite literally more valuable than the sum of the parts, even when the value of the patented technology is included. Innovation Tech industry Technology'

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The Limits of 3D Printing

Harvard Business Review

The technologies and trends shaping tomorrow’s businesses. Interestingly, the economic case for the most-cited standard part in 3D volume production today, the GE fuel nozzle for the CFM LEAP engine , is it is lighter and more fuel efficient, not a lower manufacturing cost per se. Both steps require tacit knowledge.

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Algorithms Make Better Predictions — Except When They Don’t

Harvard Business Review

Further, algorithms cannot (yet, anyway) tap intuition — the soft factors that are not data inputs, the tacit knowledge that experienced managers deploy every day, nor the creative genius of innovators. Perhaps the prediction and explanation of an engineer who is proud to have improved a piece of the variable in question. “We

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Getting Smarter about Google's "Brain Drain"

Harvard Business Review

Just yesterday, on the front page of the New York Times , came a report about how "low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers" from the executive ranks are leaving the company for high-profile companies such as Facebook as well as venture-funded startups of the sort that dot the technology landscape.

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Even in a Digital World, Globalization Is Not Inevitable

Harvard Business Review

Most of them focus on digitalization specifically and on communications technology, though some attention continues to be paid to transportation infrastructure (e.g., For more than 150 years now, new technologies have been touted as making the world one. Parag Khanna’s Connectography ).