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 A story from an often neglected industry: shipbuilding. A new technological trajectory seemed to emerge during the last decade, with the launch of large and extremely fast (30 knots) container ships. Unfortunately, the economic crisis and a new vision onsustainability has changed the tradeoffs between vessel speed and operating cost. Technology is definitely shaped by demand.

The diffusion of netbooks exhibits many interesting traits of radical and disruptive innovation: the change in technical tradeoffs and product architecture (though not of core technology), the downsizing in performance (good enough for a new market), the inertia shown by incumbents.

Part of Google's success is due to its secret algorithm, capable of delivering search results that are relevant to users, but also marketable to firms. The problem is that Google has the power to grow or kill any business by simply moving it up or down the hierarchy in search results. Some firms are starting to complain about fairness of this (especially the ones that partially compete with Google). However, it is up to antitrust authorities and end users to decide on the right tradeoff between convenience and neutrality of results.

The story of Zai, makers of luxury ski equipment, is interesting and typical of firms who plan to work on a differentiation strategy and carve themselves a niche with little competition, at the same time solving technical tradeoffs in a different way than done by "traditional" competitors