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The objective of the study is to document the existence of innovation gaps between the EU and its main competitors in specific ICT sub-sectors namely web services,
industrial robotics and display technologies and to explore the role of government policies in Europe's future needs for innovation in information and communication technologies (ICTS) through a comparison with the USA and Asian countries.
US companies have been the most innovative in web services. Meanwhile, Asia is much stronger than both the USA
and the EU in flat panel displays of all types, used for mobile phones, tablets, computers, TVS and other consumer electronics devices.
Case studies of Apple, Google and Robotdalen emphasize the importance of prior government intervention to form clusters, from
11 2. US-EU Innovation Performance in Web Services, Display Technologies and Robotics...13 2. 1 Web services...
15 Apple key lessons...16 Google key lessons...18 Amazon key lessons...19 Skype key lessons...
20 XING-key lessons...21 2. 2 Display technologies...21 Cambridge Display Technologies (CDT) key lessons...
24 Plastic Logic key lessons...24 Novaled AG key lessons...25 E Ink Corporation key lessons...
26 Kodak key lessons...27 2. 3 Robotics...27 irobot key lessons...29 Shadow Robot key lessons...
29 KUKA Roboter key lessons...30 R. U. Robots key lessons...31 Robotdalen key lessons...
Case studies Web Services, Display Technologies and Robotics...57 A1. 1 Web Services...57 Apple Corporation...
57 Amazon...60 Google...62 Skype...66 XING AG...71 6 A1. 2 Display technologies...
74 Cambridge Display Technology (CDT...74 Plastic Logic...77 Novaled AG...80 E Ink Corporation...
84 Eastman kodak...86 A1. 3 Robotics...89 irobot Corporation...89 Shadow Robot Company...92 KUKA Roboter...
95 R. U. Robots...99 Robotdalen...101 Appendix 2: The Value Chains in the Three Sub-sectors...
105 7 Executive Summary Innovation in US and EU companies was analysed in three ICT subsectors (web services, display technologies,
and robotics) to develop policy suggestions for best practice for innovation support. Fifteen case studies involving innovation from the three quite different ICT subsectors are given in Appendix 1. Our analysis shows that rather than there being a simple innovation gap with the EU lagging behind the USA,
US companies have been the most innovative in web services. Meanwhile, Asia is much stronger than both the USA
and the EU in flat panel displays of all types, used for mobile phones, tablets, computers, TVS and other consumer electronics devices.
with web services estimated at about €70 billion, flat panel displays worth about €75 billion and robotics valued at about €19 billion.
OLED screens of all sizes suddenly started to appear everywhere early in 2012, i e. when the preceding TFT-LCD technologies had been exploited fully
A key lesson from analysis of the three subsectors, particularly web applications, is the critical importance of higher education
Case studies of Apple, Google and Robotdalen emphasize the importance of prior government intervention to form clusters, from
since been bought out by overseas entities a Japanese semiconductor materials company (for CDT), a Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund (Plastic Logic) and a Taiwanese screen manufacturer (E Ink).
However, this is not its only role it should also endorse open source intellectual property in designs and software.
The policy suggestion is that much stronger affirmative action for open source is necessary, due to the advantages for innovating enterprises of a solid IP base at minimal cost,
This indicates that orienting public procurement towards open source software and design libraries to encourage common shared intellectual capital as a general basis for innovation in Europe has advantages for innovators and governments.
and to some extent Google, has shown, innovation cannot be centred only on technological areas but must also be applied in product and service design.
From the US experience we know that Stanford university has had a tremendous impact on the emergence of high-tech companies in Silicon valley, starting with Hewlett packard all the way to Google.
Using a case study approach in three ICT sub-sectors (web services robotics and display technologies) the study examined the following questions:
What is the nature of the differences in innovation performance between Europe and the USA in these sub-sectors?
and because the USA has clear advantage in one (web), the EU in another (robotics) and Asia has the advantage in the third (displays).
Evidence was gathered from the practical experience of innovative firms through fifteen case studies five from each sub-sector.
XING in web services; Novaled, E Ink, CDT and Plastic Logic in displays; and in robotics, Shadow Robot, R. U. Robots;
we also include the Swedish robotics programme for start-up robotics suppliers and users, Robotdalen. SMES are of particular interest for several reasons:
Chapter 3 ends with the policy suggestions that emerge from our analysis. 13 2. US-EU Innovation Performance in Web Services,
Display Technologies and Robotics In this Chapter we put forward an overview of the technological evolution of each sub-sector, specifically with regard to the factors affecting innovation performance in the EU and the USA for:
Web services, Display technologies, Robotics. Annual global revenues for the three sub-sectors show their relative significance,
with web services estimated at about $92 billion (about €70 billion), 3 flat panel displays worth about $99 billion (about €75 billion) 4 and robotics valued at about $25 billion
Clearly US companies have acquired a dominant position in web services, quickly building on innovative breakthroughs in software, design and new business models (e g.
Google, Apple and Amazon. Even so, there are well known examples of European innovation in this sub-sector, e g.
Skype. In the robotics sub-sector, while US firms have established a position with military robots (e g. irobot),
Indeed, the US ROBOTICS industry has analysed recently its competitive position and its assessment was critical of US failings in this sub-sector. 6 Meanwhile,
both the USA and the EU have lost ground in flat panel display screen production. Initially both the USA and the EU have contributed significant technological developments in display technologies,
jostling for the lead in the early stage innovation in novel screen technologies (for 3 SCF Associates Ltd estimate based on the nine top web service providers'revenues in 2010
/2011 (with Apple revenue counted as directly online dependent only for 10%of its 2011 revenues of $108 billion,
and advertising on the ipad is increasing rapidly. See the web services value chain in Appendix 3 for the verticalization strategy used by Apple, Google, etc.
4 UK Trade and Investments, 2010, Flat Panel Displays, quotes Displaysearch, 2009 figures. 5 SCF Associates Ltd, 2010.6 Unfortunately the United states lags behind other countries
in recognizing the importance of robotics technology. While the European union, Japan, Korea and the rest of the world have made significant R&d investments in robotics technology, the US investment,
Display technology needs much more post-innovation effort in commercialization, since the development stages of mass-market products (see value chain in Appendix 2) require‘crossing the valley of death'to initial production and then full-scale industrial volumes for a mass market of displays for mobile phones,
tablets and PCS and other consumer electronics. In this subsector the EU has lost practically any initiative,
but the USA has lost also out to Asian manufacturers for instance, Kodak made the first discovery of OLEDS
In web services, however, the USA does lead, owing to combinations of successful first mover advantages, network effects and increasing returns.
as the case study of Skype shows. But Skype was seeded by US VC investors and eventually acquired by leading USA web services players, first ebay and now Microsoft.
In the following sections we analyse in more detail the development of companies in the three sub-sectors,
and we discuss the lessons that can be learnt from the case studies. 2. 1 Web services For this sub-sector,
there is little evidence of direct government intervention having any real impact on the ability of firms to innovate
driven by advertising and ecommerce sales of various kinds. Direct research support or public sector programmes aimed at companies are notable by their absence.
Google being a good example. It is a sub-sector where the USA dominates with the largest players all being first movers Google in search, Facebook in social media, Apple in music content with itunes, ebay with online auctions and Amazon in online retail.
The cases studies analysed in this sub-sector show that the success stories are based on a combination of two elements.
First, the capital investment required to start an internet-based operation is relatively low. Start-up costs can be minimal
because all that is required is a computer and a desk and living expenses for the entrepreneur.
Facebook for instance, got off the ground initially using finance from the founder's parents, to buy servers and support programmers'costs (Kirkpatrick, 2010).
Costs will rise in stages but overall the finance needed for a web services business will typically be millions or tens of millions of dollars,
and usually a lot less. The tangible deliverable is web software during the early stages. Most capital demands are restricted to web server farms (see the web services value chain in Appendix 2) and even these can be hosted by third party data centres who offer website services for start-ups.
Second, in the web services sub-sector, a successful venture will reach break even and commercial viability relatively quickly, usually less than five years.
Or put another way, if a web services start-up is not profitable within five years the founders
and investors will probably have moved on. Payroll expenses are kept typically 16 low as stock options can be used
and also overall numbers of staff may be small even after eight years of operation, Facebook has only 3, 200 staff yet 800 million users (Waters, 2012).
Third, as illustrated by these numbers, the rate of growth owing to network effects can be extremely high.
These three attributes make web-based start-ups attractive to VCS and so this sub-sector is characterized by the overriding presence of such investors.
Silicon valley for Google, Apple and Facebook, Seattle for Microsoft and Amazon. These US clusters have drawn on government local investments for R&d
and leading on to the West Coast around Stanford and UCLA. In contrast, the EU initiatives in web services that are successful tend to occupy specialized niches in the market.
and protect their position against US equivalents such as Linkedin. Both niche players and globally successful European ventures are attractive targets for acquisition.
Skype, for instance, is an example of a successful European web start-up that achieved global pre-eminence
Other relevant cases are in ecommerce of books national operations in the UK and Germany were bought out by Amazon as a way of extending its competitive profile into new geographic markets
In future web service markets, there may be new application areas (and accompanying business models) with global appeal in which the EU can develop major players.
and growth as a hardware manufacturer but also because of its later reinvention and move into web services.
first, at the homebrew computer club in Silicon valley hosted at Stanford university which had an open IP culture;
as in OLED technology for flexible displays. Apple takes a view on what is most important to control internally it and
Thus, although it has acquired two‘fabless'semiconductor companies to lay out its processors the original processor conceptual design for its smart phones and ipads is licensed Cortex
from ARM in the UK, and the graphics processor may come from NVIDIA. Apple has strived always to control the whole customer experience
and so moving to integrate web services into that experience was a natural course and part of its emphasis on design for ease of use.
Underlying this is the aim to lock in the customer from end to end, i e. device, service and content.
The chosen structure of the itunes website has always been to exploit its ease of use
Thus the web service, at its inception, was coupled to the software (Apple's ios) and its hardware, the ipod originally,
because Apple had noted the enormous difficulty of using MP3 players, particularly with web services and PCS, at the time.
Apple thus moved into web services coupled to its Macintosh range, creating proprietary protocols for access
and download from its web content server. The key lesson here is to create verticalization using web services as one component (see Appendix 2 on value chains.
Apple was the first to do it followers are Google with Android and the various Android-based apps stores (with a Google smart phone or tablet possibly soon),
and Amazon with the Kindle e-reader and its accompanying tied book format. Influencing the whole value chain with a basic innovation
OLED screens of all sizes suddenly started to 18 appear everywhere, i e. when the preceding TFT-LCD technologies had been exploited well
is free when designing for a new product (e g. a new smart phone) to choose from many competing display technologies.
whether to go for TFT-LCD (the current display technology) or e-ink or OLED screens,
Google key lessons Google's success depended on two extraordinary, self-confident and highly talented people unwilling to follow the crowd.
combined with the Pagerank search algorithm, powered their success. There is no doubt that, at Stanford, Google's founders benefited from a very supportive
and nurturing environment with mentors who were able to protect them and indulge their activities.
Public funding of basic research had a part to play in the Google success 19 story,
it is hard to identify any way in which Google directly benefitted from government support.
The lessons from Google are difficult to translate into policy support for innovation. It seems like a unique set of circumstances.
as Stanford did towards Google's founders. Amazon key lessons The more advantageous business environment in the USA was a key factor for Amazon's successful start up and growth in its first few years.
Websites would also have had to be language specific for the ordering process. The EU's highly variable tax and business conditions across the 27 Member States contrasts with the largely uniform situation in the USA.
in Seattle, Amazon was in proximity to Microsoft, which brought high-level personnel for technical positions, for building and then running web services in vast data centres with fast transaction processing, large customer databases and data mining for refined data analysis,
for customer profiling and knowledge of cloud computing platforms. Strong network effects are important in web services for both viral marketing for retail but also networks of business angels,
VCS and others who can support nascent ventures in a variety of ways, for instance, identifying specialist staff to manage large data centres
and high performance databases. 20 Well-developed infrastructure was also important, e g. the supply chain for physical delivery with its infrastructure of warehousing, roads and airports for national delivery.
The trust of customers is paramount and is higher in the USA than in the EU
. Thus American citizens are less wary of giving personal data to private firms. Amazon's customer databases hold names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, profiled preferences and, most important, credit card details of its 137 million customers.
The USA therefore proved to be a more conducive environment to launch a business that depended on holding such information with less need to reassure customers over privacy and security.
Skype key lessons With Skype first the entrepreneurial and creative impetus came from two individuals who identified the opportunity for voice over the internet.
They combined this with the Estonian engineering talent that they had identified already in a previous venture to start Skype.
It raises the policy question of whether you can teach entrepreneurship or are born you with it.
How can an entrepreneurial spirit best be nurtured and supported in society? Officially headquartered in Luxembourg for tax and other incentives (Pricewaterhousecoopers, 2006),
its prime locations were Tallinn (for software engineering), Palo alto (for VC) and London (for general business).
It meant that Skype got the best of all worlds tax credits in Luxembourg but operations located where the human
(i e. national state municipality/regional) as some Member States in Europe or Asia would attempt to bring together. 21 XING-key lessons Xing is an example of a relative European success in Web services,
establishing a social network for professionals similar to Linkedin. Success has come from high quality management, a well-focused strategy and execution of a viable business model.
XING might seem to be a more risky venture than much larger web service players, such as Linkedin and Facebook.
So if there is to be government support for new ventures in the web services sub-sector (with support for clusters, tax-breaks,
These niches may hold the best chances to thrive against heavy competition from the USA and elsewhere in mainstream web services.
The safe harbour rules for the exemption of US web service providers from EU data protection laws, under
are a source of unequal opportunity between US and EU web applications. This is an important issue
but it is beyond the scope of this study. 2. 2 Display technologies New directions in display technologies in OLEDS
and e-paper offered a brief opportunity for European firms to re-enter the displays market.
The EU has been largely absent from the displays market for the past two decades. Characterized as a high volume production commodity market, production has moved mainly to Asia, especially Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
The current generation of flat panel displays 22 (LCDS) has required tight cost controls and large amounts of capital investment.
Samsung and LG Display), Japan (e g. Sharp) and Taiwan (e g. AU Optronics) have demonstrated over the past two decades that they have capabilities far in advance of European
Asian manufacturers are starting mass production in the next generation display screens. LG and Samsung are reported to be investing some $17 billion (€13 billion) between 2011 and 2015 in OLEDS. 9 Until recently,
It is perhaps for this reason that a global cartel in LCD screens materialized among the ten largest suppliers controlling 80%of the market.
Hitachi and Toshiba to merge their advanced display businesses for small/medium screens to form Japan Display,
as a bulwark against the market dominators in flat panel makers in Korea and Taiwan.
This new screen maker will convert its LCD fabrication plants to OLED11 and may accelerate OLED mass 8 AU Optronics of Taiwan,
the fourth biggest LCD flat panel display maker by sales, was convicted of price fixing in a US court in March 2012 and fined up to $1 billion for participating in a display screen cartel between 2001 and 2006 (Financial times 15 march 2012).
The EC also fined 5 Asian LCD FPD companies in December 2010 AU, Chi Mei Innolux, Chungwha and Hannstar, all of Taiwan and LG of Korea,
11 december 2009). 9 http://www. oled-display. net/samsung-and-lg-display-to-invest-17-billion-dollars-in-am-oled-until-2015/10 South korea fines LCD makers
27 dec 2011 http://www. electronista. com/articles/11/12/27/agree. to. help. prosecute. other. lcd. panel. vendors/11 Talkoled,
20 nov 2011, Japan Display to convert a 6-Gen LTPS fab to AMOLED? http://www. talkoled. com/tag/oled-production/23 production in a $2. 7 billion (€2 billion) investment for both R&d and production.
It has bought also Panasonic's Mobara LCD plant to convert it to OLED displays, planning for mass production of OLED screens by 2013.
If so, it will be the largest active matrix OLED plant planned worldwide for small/medium panels (i e. for mobile devices.
In this way, the Japanese will build mass market scale in mobile phone and tablet size screens (3 to 12) for the expected market expansion from 2013 to 2016.
Thus the future display screens market is likely to be dominated by the largest Asian flat screen producers,
Kodak recently sold its OLED patents to LG Display of Korea, who also acquired some patents from Philips. Meanwhile,
and Apple's ipad showed the limitations of its first generation device. It has recently been bought out by a Russian sovereign wealth fund to set up production in Russia.
Hence one cannot cite the USA's innovation in displays as being hugely successful, and more so than those of the EU. Apple, HP, IBM, Motorola and other very large US producers of ICTS using displays tend to be users of existing technology,
buying it in from others, rarely originators. Moreover, the role of government support in such US innovation
Cambridge Display Technologies (CDT) key lessons The role of higher education hosting leading edge research is highlighted once again by the case of CDT.
The time frame for commercialization of web services is typically short only a few years; for complex technologies and where the market has yet to develop,
which means it is very different from internet start-ups. Moreover in a start-up company, it could take many years to perfect new technologies as revolutionary as replacing silicon with plastic transistors for a flexible electronic display.
Yet most private investors may not be willing to wait. While angel investors can seed start-ups, innovative companies of this type in need of sustained capital investment over many years.
Fortunately, Plastic Logic has been saved'by a massive injection of £440 m (€530 m) from Russian investors, hopefully a second life for the business. 13 Furthermore,
Hence it has moved fairly far from its core expertise, in semiconductor technology into a specific consumer electronics product segment.
E-Ink's technology became highly attractive to larger display screen manufacturers, especially its partner who had perfected
Although the Apple Macintosh did break new ground (with its injection of intellectual capital from Xerox PARC) it still relied on supply of the latest technologies from outside Apple (for its bit-mapped screen
floppy disk drive, mouse and M68000 processor) though all was designed within Apple, including the single button mouse (Rose, 1989).
Kodak key lessons The lessons from Kodak are quite clear. Making discoveries and inventions is only part of the innovation process.
Korea's LG has acquired now significant assets that make it one of the key players in the next generation of display technologies. 2. 3 Robotics In this sub-sector,
Japanese future robotics research is fixated on android services robots for a potential future in care and domestic service, for its aging population,
and safety hardware. Thus in pure design and manufacture of robots for civilian purposes, Europe leads the USA.
the enthusiasm of its founder and the core team and the fact that it has had to survive hand-to-mouth for so long has meant that Shadow Robot has a resilience
dependent upon open source software and libraries; producing a source of high quality staff from academic research.
Open source software (e g. from Willow Garage, DLR and others) is to be preferred, especially for government supported R&d projects,
be it setting up a web farm and then scaling it up to millions of users,
In this section we mostly discuss the role of venture capital in funding web applications in the USA
Apple computer was seeded by Mike Markkula, an ex-marketing manager for Intel, whose own $90, 000 injection and guarantee of a credit line of $250, 000 transformed garage-based Jobs and Wozniak into a business capable of delivering the first order for Apple.‘
Internet start-ups are ideal VC investments, as our case studies of Google, Skype and XING show especially for US VCS,
characterized by rapid payback with low entry costs and are not capital intensive. Thus web services such as Facebook, ebay, Twitter, etc have been favoured strongly by the VC community.
Yet, the US VC industry has been investing in diverse sectors, and not only ICT or web applications and in large companies as well;
Lerner (2010), 16 (Table 3. 2) reports that...those public firms supported by venture funding employed 6%of the total public-company workforce most of these jobs high-salaried, skilled positions in the technology sector.
However, the USA has been much less successful in those technologies that require longer term investment and support such as robotics and displays.
One reason why web applications companies have been founded and grown in the USA is because VC funds have been more readily available in the USA,
based on recent data from the UK compared with the USA. The historical US EU gap cannot be explained by the characteristics of the funds alone.
http://www. thecityuk. com/research/our-work/reports-list/sovereign-wealth-funds-2012/37 Sovereign funds can spur entrepreneurial activity owing to their abundant capital resources and long-term outlook
They were a significant factor for the display start-ups and innovators CDT Plastic Logic and E-Ink (as well as for Kodak) in their early innovation through start up and establishment.
and far more recently in web services, e g. for Google. Here the protection of IPR through patents has allowed Apple to defend its position against newcomers attempting to enter some of its markets (e g. smart phones and tablets.
IPR has now become a key competitive weapon in the USA in ICTS. The battle with rivals is fought no longer out only in the marketplace but also in the courts.
The competitive advantage from holding patents is behind Google's purchase of portfolios of patents from IBM, twice in 2011 and also the $12 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
Apple aggressively prosecuting its own supplier, Samsung, over tablet design. Registered existing patents held by others,
(which include software and business models) and their permitted generality combined with ease of filing make the threat of overlap litigation more probable.
Also with the inadmissibility of patents on software, business models or processes, the field for innovators appears more open
The two leading open innovation structures are patent pools (Shapiro, 2001) and open source, which have different functions, applications, levels and modes of use.
The use of open sources in technology or software has a major impact on innovation as they reduce the cost of entry to a business,
as seen in the robotics cases and in web services. Moreover they have increasing returns with volume across a whole sector
of creating the asset once (be it software or designs or other IPR) realized across the many enterprises who exploit that asset (and again leverage) for their own production.
2006) and recently this has taken new directions in‘open source goods'to solve the problems of product complexity (Wei and Wei, 2011).
Note that the whole web services 40 subsector came into being and is still based on open source software for the World wide web, the internet communications and management protocols and the majority of web server operating systems (Forge, 2004).
There are also many examples of how open innovation principles are applied in the ICT industries, such as consumer electronics (Christensen et al, 2005.
This may be permitted explicitly, for instance with open source software licences of the UNIX BSD type. A major example is Apple's ios and Macos
which are based on developments from an open source operating system from Carnegie mellon University, Mach 3. 0. Note that where there are grey areas in the uses of IPR for web services
and their related devices (as in the web service provider verticalization model-see Appendix on business models) then major disputes are increasingly common between the dominant players,
aiming at large long-term financial gains through the courts rather than the markets. This is the case in the Oracle plea against Google in April/May 2012 over the use of the Java language to write APIS for the Android operating system. 21 Patent pools may be used where a standard complex technology is being assembled
and all the contributing IPR from different companies can be pooled as a common set of patents.
Then others pay standard‘reasonable'royalties to use the pool. This is especially useful for ICTS governed by standards such as cellular mobile and image processing
with the MPEG series. As patent pool participants have to make a tangible contribution, a certain amount of preexisting research and development is required,
or offers less valuable or irrelevant patents to claim disproportionate royalties, all of which requires adequate contracts to set up and then monitor.
Patents outside the pool become 21 Java is owned by Oracle, and its open source status has always been in a grey,
relatively undefined area. The use of a programming language to create the APIS has been considered‘fair use'in the past.
Moreover the knowledge of how APIS work is essential for the ICT industry to build compatible software modules for instance the PC industry could not have been created without it,
yet is could be argued that this is proprietary knowledge (Waters, 2012). 41 proprietary technology. Note that there is also a risk of the patent pool being declared illegal,
if the pool becomes the basis for international standards (e g. as for 3g mobile with UMTS)
From our case studies, especially in robotics it is evident that open source IPR is important in innovation, specifically for software and for standard design libraries of structured data.
under open source licences for use in commercial applications. This provides the basis for KUKA's own design libraries.
Willow Garage, supported by Google, has made open operating 42 systems for robots available, which are used widely in the academic and triple-helix style innovation communities driven by academia. 22 In contrast to patent pools,
open source is based on disclosure and freedom to use the IPR built by a team of collaborators under acceptance by contract of various conditions contained in the open source licence,
of which there are many variations in legal constraints (Forge, 2004). Open source projects are collaborative developments (often of software),
where the source code as well as any updates are openly available to its users and creators. Although most related to the software industry, in theory open source can be employed to share original IPR in any sector. 23 By using open source software, in accordance with the open source licence, the SME gains significant protection from infringements on proprietary
software, ideas and copyrights, as the source code and thus its concepts are openly available to all.
Note that the freedoms and limits vary with the licence the BSD24 Unix type of licence is the most open permitting any use of any part of the code for commercial purposes,
without requirements for posting any open new improvements or additions to the original open source library (as for instance the GNU licence requires).
Perhaps it is for this reason that three of the most important operating systems in the world are, in their fundamentals, based on open source injections of IPR from various versions of the Unix operating system.
These are Apple's ios (whose origins lie in Steve jobs'Next Nextstep operating system, based on the MACH kernel from Carnegie mellon University, with Freebsd source code extensions), Linux,
and Google's Android. We may expect this importance will be amplified over the coming decades as all three figure in tomorrow's ICT world of mobile devices,
while their only rival, Microsoft's proprietary Windows, has a comparatively minor market share today in mobile
and its future here is still unclear. 22 The European commission's Interchange of Data between Public Administrations Programme (IDA) in 2002 financed an independent study on the opportunity of making software specific to the public administrations
available for reuse, by creating a place where to pool all software given by administrations,
after OSS was perceived by the EC as both a great opportunity and an important resource for the EU development,
as mentioned by Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, in 1999, when the EC opinion was that by focusing on open software standards(.)
it may be possible to spark European creativity in this area and dramatically reduce our reliance on imports (ISTAG,
1999). 23 Recent work shows how"econometric estimates indicate that entrepreneurial ventures collaborating with the OSS community exhibit superior innovation performance compared with their non-collaborating peer"(Piva, Rentocchini and Rossi-Lamastra, 2012),
therefore indicating that collaborations with the OSS community should exert a positive effect on entrepreneurial ventures'innovation performance. 24 Berkeley Software Distribution a free open source licensed version of the Unix operating system from the Regents of the University
of California at Berkeley. 43 In the market, OSS is highly significant as a balance.
The commercial software industry is dominated by the positive feedback effects of the power of increasing returns as sales volume mounts the seller gains market power to obtain more power in the market
and so more leverage to squeeze out rivals. Over the past 20 years in the USA, this kind of market behaviour has been tolerated in software markets in ways that were not in earlier eras in sectors such as energy and rail by antitrust laws.
Software escaped notice because, early on, courts were persuaded that they could not rule first, because they did not understand software and its conflicts.
Second, the legislature did not intervene as software was seen as a peripheral product, not central to an economy,
and so was an esoteric subject on which to rule. Only over the last decade, led by the European commission in its landmark rulings against Microsoft,
25 has changed this, and fairly significantly. Today this is no longer the case as it is increasingly recognized that software is at the heart of the modern economy based on high technology and knowledge work.
This dependence will grow dramatically. In the next decade many countries will move to absolute dependence on software in all major sectors of employment and economic prosperity, from health to banking to steelmaking.
OSS becomes increasingly important as means to balance the market power of proprietary software suppliers.
Proprietary power is being increased, protected in the cloth of legality over IPR, to build increasingly wide de facto standards in the software market.
For instance, some years ago, Microsoft added a browser and a media player and so cut out the market for these as separate products.
OSS balances moves to de facto standards and monopoly pricing by: First, restoring complete choice to the users,
and second, ensuring open interworking as all interfaces are published freely in the public domain. OSS acts as a necessary rebalancing of market powers,
but also in endorsing open source. The latter action may be through 25 The rulings against Microsoft on bundling
Mr Almunia, to Google on abuse of its significant market power, in search related practices (Alex Barker, 2012, Google told to change
and services having open source licences. This can reduces costs and increase security, especially for software for common utilities and applications
such as operating systems, web servers, databases and office systems. Note that the role of the European commission in stimulating research development and innovation, RDI,
in joint ventures has taken a new direction in 2012. Its upcoming EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020 for a 2014-2020 time frame, opens a new avenue for scientific, technological and industrial research,
as in the case of Google or CDT. Sometimes, entrepreneurs were the driving force harnessing the skills of technicians (e g.
Skype. In most cases, beyond the discovery the company required a variety of knowledgeable and skilled people, both technical and managerial, to progress.
Google's founders benefited from a very supportive, nurturing environment, with mentors who were able to protect them
27 Of the top 50 departments in the world in different subject areas, the majority are found in the USA (39 of 50 in computer science, 33 in engineering, 37 in neuroscience)( Technopolis, 2011;
Case studies of Apple, Google and Robotdalen emphasize the importance of government intervention to form clusters from
and EU education systems and the possible impacts on innovation. 28 A study by Florian (2007) found that the results emerging from the ARWU data were not replicable,
calling into question the comparability and methodology of the data used in the ranking. 46 example of innovation as an admired pursuit,
The case studies of Google Apple, E Ink, irobot and Amazon emphasize that moving on to a new company is normal,
This may take the form of direct funding of research, public procurement or support for clustering,
As already highlighted, in web applications there is little evidence of direct government intervention having an effect.
Fairchild sold transistors for the new B-52 bomber's navigation computer, at $200 each, to IBM military research in Owego (Edwards, 2012.
Ten years later Intel would be formed by four of the Fairchild engineers from the original traitorous eight who left Shockley
A key lesson from the experiences of all the subsectors, particularly web applications, is the critical importance of higher education and of local networks in the formation of clusters.
At Stanford, Google's founders benefited from a very supportive, nurturing environment, with mentors who were able to protect them
Case studies of Apple, Google and Robotdalen emphasize the importance of government intervention to form clusters from
but also in endorsing open source IPR, research results and software. The policy suggestion is that much stronger affirmative action is necessary for public procurement to be oriented to open source software
libraries and common shared intellectual capital (Forge, 2006. Internet start-ups are ideal VC investments, as our case studies of Google, Skype and XING show having relatively low entry costs and low capital intensity.
Thus web services such as Facebook, Google, ebay, Twitter, etc are favoured strongly by the VC community.
As the examples of CDT and Plastic Logic in the case studies show, however, venture capital may be less likely to have the scale in time
and magnitude for complex technologies that require longer-term investment. When VC funding is inappropriate,
public funding instruments (such as the US SBIR, now envisaged in the EC's Horizon 2020) can be suited better,
A Roadmap for US ROBOTICS From Internet to Robotics, Computing Community Consortium and Computing Research Association, http://www. us-robotics. us/reports/CCC%20report. pdf Chandy, R.,Tellis, G,
Forge, S. 2004), Open source Software: Importance for Europe-What Future does OSS hold for Europe today?
the economic impacts of open source software, info, Vol 8, No 3. Forge, S. Blackman C.,(2010), A Helping hand for Europe:
The Competitive Outlook for the EU Robotics Industry, Final Report for IPTS, SCF Associates Ltd, July 2010 from:
a Silicon valley Adventure, Little, Brown, New york. Kirkpatrick, D. 2010), The Facebook Effect, Virgin Books. Kuczmarski, TD,(1996), What is innovation?
2008/09, British Business Angels Association, URN 10/994, http://www. bbaa. org. uk/sites/default/files/media/files/bbaa annual market report 2008-2009
Pierrakis, Y. and Collins, L. 2011), Crowdfunding Innovation, NESTA Blog, 25 november 2011, http://www. nesta. org. uk/assets/blog entries/crowdfunding innovation Piva
C. 2012), Is Open source about innovation? How interactions with the Open source community impact on the innovative performances of entrepreneurial ventures, Journal of Small Business Management, 50,340 364.
Porter, M.,(1985) Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, Free Press NY, 1985. Pricewaterhousecoopers (2006), Luxembourg:
the End of Innocence at Apple computer, Penguin, New york. 56 Scitax Advisory Partners (2011), Overview of Research & development Tax Incentives in Selected Global Knowledge Economies, Ver.
Stancik J. and Biagi F,(2012), Characterizing the Evolution of the EU R&d Intensity Gap Using Data From Top R&d Performers, mimeo.
Report to the European Research Area Board, http://www. technopolis-group. com/resources/downloads/reports/Technopolis report to erab on vc and yollies october 2011. pdf Tellis, G.,Prabhu, J,
/aug2007/sb20070821 920025. htm Waters, R. 2012), Investors seek things to like on Facebook, Financial times, 3 february.
Waters, R. 2012), Court fails to settle battle over Android, Financial times, 8 may. Wei, W. and Wei, F. 2011), The impact of product complexity and heterogeneity on online open innovation practices
and Innovation, http://www. nap. edu/catalog. php? record id=11989 Westerberg, U.,(2009), VINNOVA Report VR 2009: 19, The Public sector-one of three collaborating parties.
Case studies Web Services, Display Technologies and Robotics A1. 1 Web Services Apple Corporation Apple computer was founded in April 1976 in a garage in Los Altos near Cupertino
when it substituted a US$25 microprocessor, the 6502 from Mostek, for the conventional choice at the time, the US$179 Intel 8080,
to make a whole computer motherboard for under $700. Following R&d injections from Xerox PARC, over the next 20 years it then developed a series of highly successful small computers with quite conventional operating systems
and quite advanced human interfaces to offer ease-of-use for high productivity. Early on Apple developed a strong emphasize on industrial design in functionality
external appearance, expressed through complementary design of software and hardware for ease-of-use. Apple's design emphasis has profited from one of its founder's sojourns,
Today such innovative design is the key competitive edge in the consumer electronics sub-sector and web services.
It has led to the ipod, iphone and ipad and itunes and Apple's App store. Apple has had failures,
Apple has changed radically, turning away from pure hardware and software for computing to combining bundles of web services.
More specifically, its itunes web service, for downloadable music tracks with a clever low pricing policy,
and its proprietary download software has revised the music industry. Equally, its smart phone, the iphone,
and its associated Apple Store web service for application(‘apps')purchases and download has revised the mobile cellular industry.
This is a most significant change in its own business model. The plunge into Web-based services was been designed carefully to complement the simultaneous move into pure consumer products
with the ipod, and away from pure computing. Thus Apple's major business segments have advanced out of hardware and software products for personal computing and graphics into global retail services, with chains, of both online and physical shops.
Its websites for interactive and download services are aimed at a higher-end mass market. The net result is verticalization:
58 consumer device tied to device content and services that in tandem lock in the end-user (see the web value chain in Appendix 2). It provides Apple control of every stage of the‘user experience'.
'Apple has engineered the success of its Apps Store by not only platforming an ecosystem of third party apps developers to produce creative content and applications for consumers,
but also by seizing the way in which its content is distributed. Its own websites form the direct distribution mechanism,
bypassing content aggregators, content retailers and in the case of content for the iphone, the mobile operators.
Hence, consumers get the content they want with convenient app search, download and payment, while developers receive their fair share of revenue.
This follows its vision as expressed by the key founder Jobs, is to‘make insanely great things'for ordinary people.
In the mid-1970s in California there was also the idea that computers would somehow bring freedom to everyone,
In August 2011, Apple Inc.,attained the largest market capitalization globally, taking first place from Exxon Mobile, with some US$370 Billion (18 SEP 2011) and advanced in February 2012 to over US$500
and virtually has leadership in new business models for the web platform and for its hardware and software products.
and had to find funding sources from everywhere-even going to rival Gates of Microsoft for several hundred million dollars.
shown a technology that let users interact with a workstation via graphics, with windows, icons and pull down menus (WIMPS) instead of entering complex line commands.
Jobs noted that Xerox could have dominated the computer industry. But instead the Xerox‘vision'was limited to building another copier.
the end of innocence at Apple computer, Penguin, USA. Slideshare download (2011) The innovation secrets of Steve jobs,
taken from book, Mcgraw hill, October 2010, The innovation secrets of Steve jobs. Evan Doll,(2011) Designing for ipad, presentation, from slideshare. com, 2011.
Faber Novell (2010) Apple: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google), presentation, 2010. Isaacson, W.,(2011) Steve jobs, Simon & Schuster, NY, USA.
Fay Sweet, 1999, frog: Form Follows Emotion, Thames and Hudson, London. Interview 2011: Mike Nelson, ex IBM VP for internet technology, ex Visiting professor of web and internet impacts and innovation, now with CSC as internet specialist, WASHINGTON DC.
Interview 2011: Professor Ajay Bhalla, London, Cass Business school. Interview 2011: Xavier Dalloz, intermediary between France and Silicon valley and ICT innovations reporter (also new tablet launcher.
60 Amazon Amazon was formed in the first days of the Web, in 1995 in a warehouse in Seattle on the North West coast of the USA.
It offered early consumer e-commerce, in books only, using the first‘Mosaic'web browser and its descendents such as Netscape.
Its founder, Jeff Bezos, who came from a NY hedge fund background, was crucial to its formation, its business model, early survival,
financing and massive success. In 1994 Jeff Bezos realized that he could create a retail website that would not have the limitations physical businesses encounter:
with traditional mail and phone ordering distributors such as Ingrams the market leader in the USA.
company reports) Amazon has had one of the fastest growths in the Internet's history even against ebay and Google.
Since 2007 it has had a successful and logical expansion into e-books with its own into e-readers (the Kindle family) combined with an e-library for charged-for titles for download as in the verticalized business mode for the web services
Now it has launched cloud computing services, based on its own business infrastructure to sell to others. The company first started in Seattle as it was low-cost, with communications giving access to the whole US continent,
It then expanded overseas in the first five years via acquisition of web-based bookstores in the UK
Simon Forge SCF Associates Ltd All rights reserved 201211amazon has had one of the fastest growth rates in the history of the WEB-based industriesrevenues at 5 years from foundingus$ 0. 4 BNUS$
Bezos carefully assessed the advantages the internet could give him, and pushed them to their limits.
Amazon has shaped a quite classical business model with the Internet's specific advantages. It is not that disruptive just:
secondly that the web could boost customer care through phone and web call centres (although now this is considered a highly challengeable assertion);
and thirdly that web services enable high margin, lowest prices-again quite challengeable. Amazon's major advantage was its original innovation,
selling books over the internet. In getting there first, it grabbed the key position of first-mover.
So in the segment where it sits, it is far ahead of competitors like Barnes & noble who rated their own sales channel of shops as dominant and Amazon of minimal threat a flea at the most.
despite its apparently virtual presence in cyberspace, is very much a hardware company, needing heavy amounts of capital investment for the two key business processes:
which rely on some of the world's largest data centres with intensive use of computer hardware and storage,
sales, cataloguing and customer profiling engines on a base of cloud computing. For this it has its own hardware manufactured, rather than COTS units.
Using its data mining and profiling tools, it tries to detect market trends early and then 62 translates those trends and needs into new products and services.
and so become the largest Internet retailer in the world, is the customer review section. It occupies the bottom of most product pages it was introduced as an early way to harness personal opinions on products, free.
In 1999 it tried to set up it own auction website, directly in competition with ebay.
auctions or social media (so far!.Instead it has expanded now into 16 product categories, from the first catalogue of books.
But it has lagged in social networking and social media, leaving Facebook and Zynga as leaders in the area.
For its next attack on other web services, it is hiring social media directors and launching into social media and games with software development.
Sources: Marcus, J. 2004) Amazonia, Five years at the epicentre of the dot com juggernaut, The New Press, NY, USA SEC Filing, Annual Report Financial reports online
, http://yahoo. brand. edgar-online. com/Displayfiling. aspx? dcn=0001193125-11-016253; http://uk. finance. yahoo. com/q/pr?
s=AMZN; Faber Novell: http://www. slideshare. net/fabernovel/amazoncom-the-hidden-empire Google Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation,
headquartered in Mountain view, CA. It provides internet search and advertising services, as well as a plethora of online tools and platforms including:
Gmail, Maps and Youtube. Most of its Web-based products are funded free by Google's highly integrated online advertising platforms Adwords
and Adsense. 63 Google was founded in Menlo Park, CA in 1998 by Larry page and Sergey Brin while they were Phd candidates in computer science at Stanford university.
In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain view, California. The company's mission statement from the outset was"to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful"."35 The company has a well-known unofficial slogan"Don't be evil".
"36 Google's growth since its launch has been phenomenal, with annual revenue growing to almost $30 billion in a little over 10 years. 96%of revenue comes from advertising,
is still growing It is now valued at $190 billion. It is the most successful company of the internet age.
Initial innovation and start-up While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page,
Larry page's Phd research focused on analysing the relationships between websites, an approach akin to citation analysis,
whereby a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.
Page and Brin's new search engine was called initially Backrub, because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site,
but was renamed Pagerank and then Google. In 2001, Google was granted a patent describing its Pagerank mechanism.
The patent was assigned officially to Stanford university with Lawrence Page as the inventor. Initially Google was very much an intellectual, scientific, Utopian endeavour.
Without doubt both Page and Brin were outstanding computer scientists but, beyond that, their most notable characteristic was their overwhelming self-belief as Barry Diller put it,
they were wildly self-possessed. 37 While Page and Brin knew they had a unique search engine,
initially they had no business plan that would monetize their innovation. Indeed, they were so uncertain about
whether to pursue the idea that they tried to sell it to rivals in early 1999,
because they thought it was too much of a distraction to their studies. They offered to sell it to Alta vista,
Yahoo and Excite for $1m they turned it down. Google's success seems contradictory, the curious result of its founders'unstinting belief in pursuing
what they thought was right rather than the pursuit of commercial success. Initially there was no business plan
because they were interested predominantly in building a better search engine unsullied by commercial consideration. Page and Brin eschewed the straightforward commercial approach of other search engines that traded higher ranking for payment;
this was 35 http://www. google. com/about/corporate/company/36 http://investor. google. com/corporate/code-of-conduct. html 37 CEO, Interactivecorp.
See Auletta, p. 53.64 anathema to Page and Brin, who wanted their search engine to produce the most relevant search results to a query.
What they understood early on was mattered what most was users. Although they did not know how to monetize it,
their approach meant they did not follow the route of companies like Yahoo and Excite that sought to be portals for a variety of content.
Google wanted to get users off their site to where they wanted to go as soon as possible.
Better search was of less interest to Yahoo and Excite because they wanted users to stay on their site for
as long as possible so they could sell banner advertising. Page and Brin were opposed to advertising because they had a purist view of the world. 38 And unlike AOL,
Google did not have revenue from subscribers. The commercialization breakthrough for Google came when it found a way to monetize search.
Adwords gave it a way of auctioning advertising slots on the search page, favouring firms offering the highest bid price and high benefits to users.
Page and Brin were opposed vehemently to advertising-funded search and resisted any move in that direction.
They maintained the uncluttered page design and in order to increase speed advertisements were based solely text. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids
and click-throughs, with bidding starting at five cents per click. Google has continued to innovate
or acquire a wide range of software products. It offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail email service,
and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz and Google+.+Other applications include its web browser Google chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software,
and the Google talk instant messaging application. Google leads the development of the Android mobile operating system,
as well as the new Google chrome OS. In August 2011, it acquired Motorola mobility for $11. 5 billion.
Despite this activity, some analysts believe that as the company has got bigger so quickly it is finding it difficult to maintain its success. 39 Google has insisted famously that its employees be allowed to spend 20%of their time working on projects other than their core work (Innovation Time out ITO.
This has led to some notable successes, e g. Gmail, Google news, Adsense and Orkut. But the policy of letting a thousand flowers bloom has also been difficult to manage,
and also has led to some mediocre products that have relied on the marketing power of the Google brand. 40 38 According to Ram Shiram (see Auletta,
p. 53). 39 Unleashing Google norms, running the rapid innovation engine, http://nbry. wordpress. com/2011/07/26/unleashing-google-norms-running-the-rapid-innovation-engine/40 http://smartstorming-blog. com/googles-8020-formula-it-can-work-for-you/;
/http://blogs. reuters. com/mediafile/2011/10/20/sergey%E2%80%99s-secret-google-projects -and-the-challenge-of-1000-blooming-flowers/65 Capital investment Google received about $1miilion in angel investment around the time it incorporated in September 1998, from Andy Bechtolsheim (cofounder of Sun microsystems) Ram Shiram
(ex Netscape), David Cheriton (Stanford computer science Professor), and Jeff Bezos41 (Amazon). In June 1999, a $25 million round of funding was announced,
with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later in August 2004. At that time Larry page, Sergey Brin,
and Eric Schmidt42 agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024.43 The sale of $1. 67 billion in shares gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google. Many of the Google's original employees became instant paper millionaires.
IPR was of great concern to Page and Brin and Backrub was kept under a cloak of secrecy.
Page was a huge admirer of Tesla and he was well aware that Tesla had shared carelessly his inventions with others.
Consequently the algorithms behind Pagerank were guarded zealously. However, as Phd research students, they were expected to present their work
and so a paper was prepared eventually and delivered in January 1998.44 Location: The company's location was determined very much by the location of Stanford university.
In its very early days, Google operated out of the living room of the graduate housing apartment Brin shared in Escondido Village.
The Google computers and server were stored in Page's graduate residence. Stanford university seem to have extended considerable tolerance to Page and Brin, turning a blind eye to them acquiring computing resources.
According to Battelle, At one point, the Backrub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth,
an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet.
And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection. 45 It is hard to imagine a European university providing such a level of support to a couple of renegade Phd students,
no matter how innovative they might be. 41 Bezos was interested less in the idea and not in the business plan There was no business plan but rather in Page and Brin
I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey (Auletta, p 44). 42 From 2001-2011,
Schmidt served as Google's CEO; he is now Executive Chairman. Prior to joining Google,
he was the chairman and CEO of Novell and chief technology officer at Sun microsystems. 43 http://money. cnn. com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google. fortune/index. htm
44 Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey and Motwani, Rajeev and Winograd, Terry (1999) The Pagerank Citation Ranking:
Bringing Order to the Web. Technical Report. Stanford Infolab. 45 John Batelle, The birth of Google, Wired, August 2005, http://www. wired. com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle. html 66 Human capital:
In Larry page and Sergey Brin, there was an unusual combination of intellectual excellence and extreme self-possession.
The role of Terry Winograd as Larry page's mentor should also be mentioned. They had a strict hiring policy only hire the best
and people who will fit in. Page and Brin were notoriously choosy about who they allowed to join as a partner or as employees.
In the early days, interviews for new staff were protracted and could go on for many months. There was an acid test the airplane test that asked how would you feel
if you were stuck next to this person on a plane for several hours? This is somewhat flippant
and relied on data to hire who they thought were the best people by objective criteria.
Google benefitted enormously from the pool of talented computer scientists and other Silicon valley engineers because of the dot com crash and failure of other firms.
Google was able to take its pick from the best of the talented people around.
The VCS who invested in Google thought that Page and Brin needed proper and experienced business leadership;
but really didn't want a business executive to run Google they thought of them as bureaucrats rather than engineers and entrepreneurs.
How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, New york:
Skype Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the internet.
Skype was founded in 2003 by two Scandinavian entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennström and 67 Janus Friis, and officially headquartered in Luxembourg.
Skype was acquired by ebay in September 2005 for $3. 1 billion, but relations between the founders and ebay soured as growth targets were missed.
A 70%stake was acquired by an investment group led by Silver lake (including the original founders) in November 2009,
valuing the company at about $2. 75 billion. In October 2011 the sale of Skype to Microsoft corp was completed for $8. 5 billion. 46 VOIP (voice-over-Internet protocol) has redefined the way telephone calls are made VOIP calls are made over the internet,
using the same underlying transport technology that a Web browser uses. Zennström and Friis identified the opportunity
and created a business model in which the basic service is free. Skype users can use their computer to call other Skype users for free anywhere in the world,
since the marginal cost of a call on the internet is negligible. In contrast, traditionally a call over the public switched telephony network was determined by the distance of a call.
VOIP brings about the death of distance. The Skype software was developed originally by three Estonian programmers
Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, working for a small codeshop, Bluemoon Interactive, the same team behind the controversial file sharing service, Kazaa.
Unlike other Voip services, Skype is a peer-to-peer system rather than a client server system, and makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software;
the original name proposed Sky peer-to-peer reflects this. Skype became the global leader in internet voice communications, with more than 309 million registered users within five years of launch.
During 2010, Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls. In the fourth quarter of 2010, video calls accounted for about 42%of all Skype-to-Skype minutes,
and in 2010, users sent over 176 million SMS text messages through Skype.‘‘While Skype is not a phone company,
they are by far the largest provider of cross-border voice communications, 'says Telegeography analyst Stephan Beckert.
Skype has shown steady revenue growth since its launch reaching $860 billion in 2010 and likely to be over $1 billion in 2011.
It has yet to make a profit. This undoubtedly led to ebay becoming disenchanted with Skype's performance
and the seeming failure of synergies to emerge with ebay and its other big acquisition, online payment system, Paypal.
History and development The basis for the start-up of Skype was the coming together of the entrepreneurial skills of Zennström
and Friis and the technological innovation of the Estonian programmers spotted by 46 Detailed infographics summarizing Skype from conception are available here:
http://toddcarothers. com/2011/05/skype-from-conception-to-acquisition-infographic; or http://www. smartfatblogger. in/2011/06/skype-coming-of age-story-infographic. html 68 Zennström and Friis.
The Estonians were at the forefront of innovation in peer-to-peer software development, using the Fasttrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd
(and owned by Zennström and Friis). In 2003, Bessemer Venture Partners led the A round financing at Skype.
Bessemer, the oldest venture capital practice in the United states invested $1 to $2 million in August 2003.
A second investment round in March 2004, led by venture capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Index Ventures, resulted in $18. 8 million in new funding to expand global operations
and enhance its consumer offering. 47 So even though Skype was located in Europe and the entrepreneurial impetus and the engineering innovation were found there,
the early stage funding came from Silicon valley. Looking back on the start up of Skype Zennström said he started his new venture capital business Atomico
because the venture capital market outside of Silicon valley lags when it comes to funding innovative technologies.
As he saw from his own days as an entrepreneur,"In Europe, none of the venture capitalists had entrepreneurial backgrounds.
and the ebay threatening to completely destabilize the company. Following the departure of Zennström and Friis,
ubiquity (gaining high penetration on smart phones, PCS, TVS, and consumer-electronic devices), building tailored offerings for enterprise customers,
Meanwhile ebay was preparing to float Skype via an IPO but Zennström and Friis were done not.
They had retained the software patents for the technology Skype used through a company called Joltid Ltd
and threatened to cease licensing the technology to Skype. Eventually the dispute was settled with Skype acquiring the patents in exchange for Zennström
and Friis joining the Skype investor group with 14%ownership. ebay then sold 70%of Skype to the investor Group led by Silver lake. 47 http://www. prnewswire. co. uk/cgi/news/release?
id=119130 48 European High-tech Startups Thrive, Says Skype Founder, Stanford Business Magazine Online, March 2011, http://www. gsb. stanford. edu/news/headlines/zennstrom europe 2011. html 69 In May 2011,
Microsoft Corporation agreed to acquire Skype Communications for $8. 5 billion. The deal was completed officially in October 2011 with Skype incorporated as a division of Microsoft,
and Microsoft acquiring all of the company's technologies, including Skype, with the purchase. As a result of this deal, Zennström and Friis received $1. 19 billion, other investors led by Silver lake received $4. 76 billion,
and ebay got most of its money back in recouping $2. 55 billion. In essence Microsoft paid about $1000 per subscriber
which some have questioned as being excessive. 49 It is being seen as a defensive move by Microsoft to avoid Skype falling into the hands of Google,
a development that would also have troubled Facebook. Both Google and Facebook were reported to have been in talks to buy Skype. 50 The battle over the coming years for the VOIP market will be between Skype in the hands of Microsoft and Google talk, Apple Facetime and Facebook Chat.
Skype had a network of locations from the outset, with offices in Luxembourg, London, Stockholm, Tallinn, Tartu,
Prague and Palo alto. Although Skype was headquartered in Luxembourg, the founders probably spent as much time in their London and Palo alto offices.
Skype's largest office has always been in Estonia. This was because of the original location of the key engineering personnel Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Toivo Annus.
On the one hand, the importance of Estonia to Skype seems accidental but it has a reputation of being small, efficient and open to innovative ideas.
There is no doubt that Skype has become a kind of role model in Estonia and for other newly industrializing European states. 51 Skype has affected directly the innovative capacity of Estonia
which is now host to experienced, networked and funded talent. Former Skype personnel have founded tens of companies, primarily related to Internet services, some
of which been successful. For instance, Mikael Suvi made millions developing games for the iphone. He felt that working for Skype had become too routine.
Martin Goro ko, head of marketing for the Tallin Tehnopol technology park, says that Skype has had a bigger influence on young entrepreneurs than the Tallinn University of Technology
and the University of Tartu put together. Eighty percent of the business ideas that reach our incubator
or the general community of start-up companies are from Skype, he says. As already highlighted, there were two key relevant human capital aspects.
First the entrepreneurial creativity and risk was provided by Scandinavians, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The key technical personnel were software engineers from Estonia,
and this led to the main engineering 49 http://www. bbc. co. uk/news/mobile/business-13343600 50 http://www. huffingtonpost. com/2011/05/10
/microsoft-skype-deal-facebook n 860227. html 51 Toivo Tänavsuu, ANALYSIS: Skype has turned tiny Estonia into a hub of new Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill gates's, test market, 7 january 2011,
http://www. testmarket. eu/2011/01/analysis-skype-has turned-tiny-estonia-into-a-hub-of-new-mark-zuckerbergs
-and-bill-gatess/70 location being sited in Tallinn. Tallinn was also a centre for other computer programmers and software engineers
which provided a source of skilled staff for Skype. Luxembourg was an attractive location for the official headquarters,
52 mainly because it offered a range of public aids for business and investment such as:
Investment tax credits of 10%of the acquisition value of investments New business tax credits-a 25%exemption on corporate income tax and municipal business tax for 8 years Venture capital certificates
, up to 30%exemption on profits SME incentives up to 10%of costs incurred on investments and reorganization operations Regional and national incentives,
incentives between 17.5%and 25%of the costs of reorganization in certain regions are available.
R&d incentives the government may grant incentives between 25%and 100%of related costs. According to Scott Durchslag, 53 COO in 2009,"Our corporate headquarters has always been located in Luxembourg for several reasons.
There was early interest from investors to invest in an EU-based company. In addition the tax and legal environment is clear and consistent
"Could Skype have started in the USA rather than Europe? It is conceivable and one should recognize that most of the funding came from the USA.
Estonian IT analyst, Toivo Tänavsuu, summarizes the success of Skype in this way: The company founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, bid adieu to salaried work and dove headlong into enterprise.
Niklas Zennström, the Man Who Sold Skype Twice, Wall street journal: Tech Europe, 10 may 2011, http://blogs. wsj. com/tech-europe/2011/05/10/niklas-zennstrom-the-man-who-sold-skypetwice/52 Pricewaterhousecoopers, Luxembourg:
a Prime Location for Doing Business, 2006, http://www. pwc. lu/en lu/lu/doing-business-in-luxembourg/docs/pwc-luxloc. pdf 53 http://www. investinluxembourg. lu/ict/sites/ict
. local/files/files/Connexion%203%20q%202009%20skype. pdf 71 Mark Gimein, The social network that wasn't. The Big Money, 1 september 2009, http://web. archive. org/web/20100727140400/http://www. thebigmoney. com/articles/money-trail/2009/09/01
/social-network-wasnt? page=full http://www. crunchbase. com/person/niklas-zennstrom http://www. crunchbase. com/company/skype XING AG XING AG is a German
business social networking company. It offers a localized social networking defined by language for the business community by subscription.
The first launch was in German, across the German-speaking pale, for members in Austria and Switzerland,
as well as Germany, under the name, of Open BC,(Openbusiness Club AG). The company was founded in 2003
in comparison, its US competitor, Linkedin, had 20m at that time. Headquarters are in Hamburg, Germany and it has 420 employees worldwide.
The web service is favoured by its membership for two main reasons-to do business and to promote careers.
It has enabled XING to evolve from a business networking platform into the web interface for a widening range of services, for business professionals around the world,
XING PR, 2011) Note that German privacy laws are quite clear that the kinds of things Facebook does may not be acceptable there,
or elsewhere in the EU in some MS. German social networking sites face strict local privacy laws, meaning they must undergo a long process of verification with all users positively opting-in before they can be signed up.
The sites are prohibited also from sharing certain user data with advertisers. But US companies are exempt from these rules under safe harbour agreements between the US and the European union.
Thus the company is not able to compete with Facebook on a level playing field. However whether this is a disadvantage in the long run is unclear as prosecutions of Facebook
Google (especially Youtube) and other US web service providers may force them to align with EU standards of privacy in the future as legal processes develop.
XING has been intent on monetizing its user base-without alienating them: Cleverly, XING has expanded carefully its range of offerings into adjacent key areas that have high growth potential.
Compared say to other websites, 73 or to other services industries (utilities, mobile operators, this appears to be comparatively high).
Against the rivals from the USA, such as Linkedin, XING has a far better position, compared to those European national pure social networking sites in competition with Facebook.
For example, the Studivz group of three websites were collectively the German market leader with 13. 8m users,
with Facebook growing rapidly (over 11. 5m in the first half of 2010) to overtake
while growth of Studivz was flat. In Spain, Facebook overtook social networking national leader, Tuenti, in 2010, gaining 10. 5m users compared with the Spanish site's 6. 8m-Facebook's users tripled in a year.
Since start-up XING has used all forms of VC funding, from a business angel in May 2004, to a leading European Venture capitalist with offices in Switzerland, Germany and the UK, for a net total investment of €11. 4m.
Xing website, www. xing. com Economist (2009) A spat among professional networks-Class war-Does local beat global in the professional-networking business?
Fabernovell (2007) XING Best practice social network websites. Interview with founder, download. 74 MARKOFF, J (2007) Move over Silicon valley,
Here Come European Start-ups, NY Times, 24 jan 2007: http://www. nytimes. com/2007/01/24/technology/24munich. html?
pagewanted=all A1. 2 Display technologies Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) is a subsidiary of Sumitomo Chemical of Japan.
Today it leads the research and development of organic light emitting polymer technology used in displays, and with potential application in lighting and other organic semiconductor applications.
‘It was more that they did not see organic light-emitting diodes as a core business and I was concerned that they would simply sit on our idea
Hermann Hauser, a founding director of Acorn Computer; Steve Kahng, president of Power computing Corporation; and Esther Dyson, president of Edventure Holdings, of New york. In September 1997, further investment of about $10 million came from a financial group headed by Lord Young of Graffham, former Secretary of state for Trade
Later in the year, Intel also invested in CDT. Even so these developments were not sufficient to keep CDT independent.
By 2000 CDT had made commercial agreements with Philips, Uniax, Hoechst, Dupont, Seiko Epson, Delta Electronics and Agilent Laboratories.
By forming partnerships with companies throughout the displays value chain potential licensee could approach CDT
and be able to immediately acquire all the knowledge required for display production, avoiding the need for them to do independent development work.
It would also give licensees immediate access to all materials required for display manufacture The growth in CDT's patent portfolio is a measure of the company's R&d achievements,
and the need to build a family of patents around the core IP. By 2002 the number of patents held had risen to 140, the product of the company's steadily growing workforce,
sat, a TV screen. Halving the brightness of the blue polymer doubled its lifetime but this characteristic has proven a barrier both technologically and commercially for the company.
CDT website: http://www. cdtltd. co. uk/Tim Minshall, Stuart Seldon, David Probert, Commercializing a disruptive technology based upon University IP through Open Innovation:
A case study of Cambridge Display Technology, International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (2007), Volume:
of innovative organic flexible displays, based on its proprietary technology for plastic electronics, Plasticpaper. Over the last twelve years, the company has developed a technology that enables silicon to be replaced by plastic in integrated circuits
and so created a flexible electronic display with a continuous substrate. Commercial application of the technology yields display modules that are claimed to be more robust
flexible, lighter and cleaner to manufacture than traditional glass and silicon displays. They can be far larger and lower cost than conventional displays, potentially with higher process yields in manufacture.
Using this display technology, the company is developing a second-generation e-reader product. Plastic Logic sees itself as leading a revolution in visual information technology.
Founded in 2000 by researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge university in the UK, Plastic Logic now has its R&d centre in Cambridge, with a high-volume, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Dresden, Germany and product engineering,
sales and marketing and executive management being headquartered in Mountain view, California, USA. The manufacturing plant in Europe, in the capital of the federal state of Saxony, Dresden, is at the heart of the German electronics industry-sometimes called"Silicon Saxony".
"Germany and the Saxony region offer significant financial support grants for starting up new high technology research on manufacturing processes and production facilities.
the Plastic Logic 100, featuring a large, thin, lightweight screen based on the Plasticpaper technology with rugged construction.
At the time, the Cavendish Laboratory was developing inkjet printing to deposit polymer light emitting diodes (P-LEDS) on substrates for displays,
so that by 2006 it had developed its plastic transistor technology sufficiently to produce a display with a million transistors.
The company then produced a key application for its display an e-reader product for business, the Pro-Reader.
Of this, some US$100 million was raised in late 2006 to build an advanced manufacturing plant in Dresden for display modules for electronic readers
Led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment, the existing investors Amadeus (seed funding) Intel Capital, Bank of america,
Plastic Logic then signed deals with AT&T to sell its 3g model and with Barnes & noble as retailer for the USA.
and finally abandoned in August 2010 amidst rising competition for portable electronic displays and e-readers.
Especially significant was the ipad launch in early 2010, which transformed market expectations. Moreover over 2009-2010, Apple advanced, launching the slender, larger screen colour ipad
cutting retail prices and attracting business users, while Amazon revamped the Kindle DX, adding full PDF functionality, slimmer size 79 and price,
The Que's pricing was just too high at $649 for Wifi-only-against the ipad at $499 for Wifi only,
while the Kindle DX with 3g dropped 20%to $379. However, the company was driven to continue by the core concept-that plastics can replace silicon in transistors
-so the basic technology was still valuable enough to merit persisting with the venture. Plastic electronics promise economic,
form factor and environmental benefits over silicon semiconductor and glass-based displays. So simultaneously the company then entered negotiations with a Russian state controlled investment company, RUSNANO,
The market for its first mass produced e-reader, the Plastic Logic 100, features a capacitive touch screen.
Flexible plastic electronic displays will provide another major milestone in how people process information. Entering this new disruptive segment at the stage of its inception gives Russia a chance to win a leading position in global market of future electronics. 56 James Mawson
Logic, Wall st Journal, 18 jan 2011, http://blogs. wsj. com/tech-europe/2011/01/18/russia-leads-700m-investment-in-plastic-logic/Plastic Logic:
flat panel displays; lighting; solar power with organic photovoltaics; and printed organic electronics for all functions.
Its OLED materials and technologies are supplied to the leading display manufacturers, e g. Samsung. In May 2011, Novaled claimed to have developed the world's most power-efficient fluorescent white OLED structure,
Dr. Martin Pfeiffer, Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth and Jörg Amelung, aiming to specialize in OLED displays.
For example, Novaled supplies materials and process technology to Samsung for their OLED displays. Also Novaled may launch their own consumer brand for new lighting systems with OLED sources.
up to three times lower than conventional OLED technology, giving longer long battery lifetimes for portable devices and high efficiency for displays.
In 2006, Universal Display Corporation, of the USA and Novaled teamed up to produce red phosphorescent OLED Devices.
and other similar applications. 59 An independent open-innovation R&d centre developing generic technologies for Wireless Autonomous Transducer Solutions and for Systems-in-Foil. 82 Novaled
's dopants in Holst Centre's organic thin film transistor technologies for displays and circuits. Note that a key feature of the Holst Centre (named after the first director of Philips Research) is its partnership model with industry and academia around shared roadmaps and programs.
and displays (NSF WTEC 2010). COMED is focused increasingly on organic photovoltaics (OPV. This centre employs approximately 60 personnel, with an annual budget of €6 million/year,
and world-class facilities for processing OLED displays and OPV cells on glass and stainless steel.
but does not produce whole display screens or manufacture the OLED plastic film needed to make them.
For those who would produce displays or lighting from its technology it is possible to use existing plants and half of the equipment in them.
organic thin film transistors and solar cells, as well as displays. When Novaled started as a spin-off from Fraunhofer and Technical University of Dresden in 2001 with just 4 people,
Novaled website and its archives: www. novaled. com USA National Science Foundation,(2010) World Technology Evaluation Center, Inc.,WTEC Pane, Report on European Research and development In Hybrid Flexible
to advance electronic ink further with display developments based on this technology. Since incorporation, E Ink has advanced gradually both the core technology of the electrophoretic materials
and the applications for electronic ink displays selling micro-encapsulated ink imaging films and prototyping kits.
Originally E Ink Corporation was headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was held a privately company. It was bought by a strategic partner, PVI (Prime View International) of Taiwan in 2009 for $215 million.
In 2009, the epaper display module market was expected to grow to over $3 billion by 2013, with the emergence of colour displays and flexible displays, for the ebook and etextbook
At that time, electrophoretic display technology had more than 90%market share in the overall epaper displays, and E Ink was the leading supplier of electrophoretic materials.
when it successfully microencapsulated a micromechanical display system, creating a flexible display material with excellent reflectivity,
The patented microencapsulation process enables suspension of display material in an ink form with design
The resulting‘electronic ink'has many applications, from point-of-sale signs in retail stores, to next generation displays in mobile phones, tablets and electronic books.
In addition to electronic books, E Ink's Vizplex imaging film is used in mobile phones, signage, smartcards, memory devices,
However E Ink did not go into volume production of its electronic ink films as part of an electronic display.
and assemble all into a electronic paper display product. Thus E Ink, through PVI, seeded the e-reader market from 2005 on
It then partnered with E Ink on production of displays for electronic books, such as Sony's e-reader and the Amazon Kindles.
Also PVI invested heavily in dedicated driver chips and most importantly, the touch screens for epaper, as well as flexible displays for future products.
The E Ink deal was the final step in the transformation at PVI over the period 2005-2009 into a specialist in electronic paper displays.
It secured its supply of a critical component during the rapid growth phase of the e-reader market.
Sony launched its PRS-700 Reader with an integrated touch screen using E-Ink display film.
PVI, Epson, LG Display, Polymervision, Hewlett-packard and Plastic Logic have demonstrated all flexible active matrix displays using E Ink Vizplex imaging film.
Verizon debuted the Samsung Alias 2 cellphone, with a changeable keypad made with E Ink Vizplex.
as part of a joint development for the use of electronic ink in handheld device displays.
TOPPAN, a Japanese printing technology company, added to its initial $5 million investment in 2001, with a further $25 million,
This portfolio provides wide coverage as E-ink holds patents not only for displays, but also for methods of manufacturing the required materials, processes for assembling finished displays,
and techniques for integrating the displays into finished products. While many of E Ink's patents are focused on electronic paper
some have broader applicability in fields like organic electronics and flexible semiconductor manufacturing. It has over 100 additional patent applications pending.
The Finetech Japan Display Components & Materials Category Grand Award. Note that many such technologies were coming to market over the period 1998-2010,
and technologies from Ricoh, Pixel Qi and Qualcomm might easily have taken the lead. E-Ink leads with its improved Pearl greyscale technology and then with its Triton full colour form launched in 2010 to maintain its grip on the e-reader market.
Jimena Almendares, 2010, E-Ink, MIT Technology Review, January/February 2010, http://www. technologyreview. com/business/24245/E Ink website
Techcrunch, Devin Coldewey, 9 november 2010, E Ink's Color"Triton"E-Paper Screens Make Their Debut,
http://techcrunch. com/2010/11/09/e-inks-color-triton-e-paper-screens-make-their-debut Eastman kodak Eastman kodak Company,
Kodak has announced that it will stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames in 2012, focusing on photo printing,
In 1999, after 20 years of continued research, Kodak in partnership with Sanyo (SK Display Corporation) produced the first OLED display.
OLED pioneer Kodak believed that its OLED display screens would displace liquid crystal displays (LCDS) in digital cameras and a range of other electronic products.
A joint venture with Sanyo was started in 2003 called SK to mass-produce OLED screens for Kodak and other manufacturers.
the first camera to feature an AMOLED display, proved to be the high point though,
The company also developed manufacturing equipment and technologies around its chosen approach to producing full-colour displays:
enabling CMEL to use Kodak technology for active matrix OLED modules in a variety of small to medium size display applications. 88 Kodak also explored the use of OLEDS as a lighting solution,
with things turning from bad to worse, Kodak sold its OLED-related assets to LG for a reported $100 m. Thus, after 40 years of fundamental research, materials and device development, display manufacturing,
the inventor and first developer of OLED displays exited the business. Kodak's small molecule technology, in the form of materials and intellectual property, enabled OLED to become a mass-production display technology,
with numerous display developers licensing Kodak technology and manufacturing using vapour deposition through fine metal masks.
The vast majority of OLED displays produced to date use Kodak's technology and/or materials in some form.
This has enabled what is now a billion-dollar industry on the verge of even significant growth according to analysts Display Search.
LG formed a new company, Global OLED Technology (GOT), to exploit Kodak's two thousand OLED related patents,
Samsung the dominant player in LCD technology, announced in February 2012 that it was spinning off its LCD business, Samsung Display,
In a parallel move, it was rumoured that Samsung Mobile Display (the OLED company formed in 2008) would be brought fully under the control of Samsung Electronics.
cheap hardware and expensive consumables laid the golden e g . but in the digital era hardware margins were still slim
and software was largely free. Kodak's virtual monopoly in colour film was a cash cow.
This good fortune led to a company heavy with staff, needless jobs many layers of management and generous employee benefits.
http://ca. finance. yahoo. com/blogs/insight/kodak-lesson-ending-didn-t-happen-191731960. html Paul Semenza Kodak Exits OLED Business After 30 Years;
http://www. displaysearchblog. com/2009/12/kodak-exits-oled-business-after-30-years-lg-poised-to-compete-with-samsung/http://www. oled-display. net/samsung
who previously had worked together at MIT's Artificial intelligence Laboratory. It was incorporated in 2000 when it merged with Real world Interface
Microrig, the result of partnership with the oil industry to develop a fully autonomous robot to collect data from functioning land-based oil wells;
) Later, the company adopted Google-like practices with employees encouraged to use"free time"to work on their own ideas to develop prototypes.
market and profitability standards discouraged risk-taking and data driven research replaced intuitive visions as the main decision making tool.
for instance aiming to make existing and future robots easier to use and more adaptable with its Aware 2 cross-platform software.
AWARE 2 is a framework for creating complex robot software systems, making its robots easier to use,
The same software works on many different robots, so a single software engineer can quickly and easily program many robots without having to learn specialized languages for each one.
AWARE 2 is open source software, i e. irobot supports third-party technical development and the commercialization of the resulting work. irobot views collaboration with external developers as an essential way to provide a broad range of new capabilities to its products. irobot is happy, for instance,
that there is a Roomba hacking community. As Colin Angle has said: We're a company that really loves the fact that a Roomba hacking community exists.
Why do you think we published the API for the serial port? It's an expense
In 1982, photographer Richard Greenhill realized that programmable personal computers would make robots possible and perhaps enable his vision of a general-purpose robot that could bring him a nice cup of tea.
It is equipped with sensors to provide tactile feedback to the processor. The hand has a list price of about $100, 000,
In 2010, the company received undisclosed funding from the Ministry of Defence to develop a robotic hand to help defuse roadside bombs. 95 Open source platforms As we have seen elsewhere in the sector,
the use of open source software and hardware platforms is seen as fundamental. Shadow Robot joined the ranks of Willow Garage
irobot, and many other developers running the Robot Operating system (ROS. The company was already supporting the world robotics community:
Simulations for the device can be run using other ROS software. Programmers can work on the hand without buying a physical copy of it.
This should accelerate the rate in which new software for the device is created. Sources: Company website:
http://www. shadowrobot. com/The cool hand of technology, http://www. forbes. com/2009/08/14/shadow-robot-hand-entrepreneurs-technology-robotics. html
You've got to hand it to them, http://www. guardian co uk/technology/2009/may 14/shadow-robot-project Rich Walker, robot builder,
with the launch of its first PC-based controller, entering a new era of mechatronics for KUKA, for precise interaction of software, controller and mechanical systems.
The aim of using PC-based controllers is to deliver consistently high quality for both industrial and consumer products for a wider range of sectors, taking robots into far more industrial applications,
Further advances have been in combining machine intelligence with innovative gripper and sensor technologies to expand applications and industrial sectors.
Virtually all of the 80,000 robots installed in the field use the PC-based controller, making KUKA the leading PC-controlled robot manufacturer worldwide.
KUKA currently offers a wide selection of advanced designs, with its range of 4 and 6 axis robots from payloads of 3 kg to 1300 kg and 350 mm to 3700 mm reach,
All are controlled from the common PC based controller platform. 97 How did KUKA achieve this market position and highly innovative reputation?
KUKA's website notes that close links between development and manufacturing are a decisive factor for reducing the development times of new products.
In many areas, KUKA has benefited from the control algorithms, technologies and software developed by DLR,
then implemented in KUKA products, for example: -KUKA uses DLR's model-based minimum cycle time algorithms for high-speed spot welding for car assembly lines.
Using DLR technology, KUKA robots move up to 30%faster, while the amplitudes of the vibrations at the end effector are up to five times smaller,
KUKA has benefited from the DLR work on a robot component library, the core of all design phases.
Note also that this library is built using the open source (free) object oriented modelling language Modelica, whose model libraries cover many aspects of physical systems
specifically the Bavarian High tech Offensive in Mechatronics, initiated and founded by the Bavarian Ministry for the Economy.
Real-time Simulation for Design of Multi-physics Systems (Real-Sim) DLR and KUKA worked together, with others to perfect methods and tools for design of new robots or variants of existing
This approach has advanced the robot component library mentioned above, based on the open source Modelica language. Further development took place in this international effort involving EU companies, universities,
In the Realsim project, DLR developed a free Modelica multibody library (the download is available at http://www. Modelica. org/library
KUKA Robotics website, www. KUKA-Robotics. com Rainer Bischoff, 2009, KUKA from research to products, 12 mar 2009, 40th International Symposium on Robotics, KUKA presentation.
The Competitive Outlook for the EU Robotics Industry, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Joint Research Centre, European commission.
These include specific subsystem engineering, prototyping, complete robotics system development, studies and assessments and also robot reconfiguration and upgrades.
R. U. Robots website, www. rurobots. co. uk Robotdalen The Robotdalen innovation programme was set up in 2003.
Among them are service providers and other software specialist firms. The Robotdalen cluster initiative has been established to strengthen the ecosystem links among all the relevant businesses
simplified robot programming; faster robot reconfiguration; mobile platforms. Industrial projects-for SME users able to exploit robotics with feasibility studies (using local university students and mentors),
Robotdalen website, www. robotdalen. se Ulf Westerberg, 2009 The Public sector-one of three collaborating parties, A study of experiences from the VINNVÄXT programme, VINNOVA, Case No:
An accurate value chain assessment shows what the primary activities that add value are, revealing flows of inputs such as materials, software, sub-systems and also information and added value flows.
For instance in making a consumer product such as a smart phone, assembly of the units may be the simplest activity,
while there may be very differing value among the components such as the display panel with its touch screen, the processor and the software such as a standard operating system.
what business model is likely to be most successful for instance the trend to verticalization in the web services sector from device to operating system to service as a lock in mechanism in a web market. 106 1 The Web Services value chain:
web farms requires the largest capital investment Simon Forge SCF Associates Ltd All rights reserved 2012 1 Deploy,
Integrate, and run on webfarm R&d & IPR (Option) download Apps store R&d, Test, Release Basic web system design and operations setup Integration into commercial web environmentmarketing
Sales & After sales Generic Web Services Value Chain for a large operation (Google, Apple, Amazon,
and display Other major business processes eg logistics systems for item delivery for e-commerce Webfarm Build & Test Distribution Sales & Marketing R&d Manufacture Web Applications
Development Business Concept & plan Operating systems (eg Android) Smartphones (eg iphone) Tablets (eg ipad, Amazon Fire) E-readers (eg Amazon Kindle) MP3 music players (eg ipod) 3rd party apps developers Set up
and distribution systems, including apps/content stores Data centres development Design Custom systems development (eg CPUS) Webfarms 24x7 operation Design Build Test Operate 3rd
-electric, pneumatic, hydraulic, coherent light, coolants, etc Control, communications and coordination systems Simulation packages Software development tools 107 3a:
The displays industry value chain for OLEDS full production is capital intensive Simon Forge SCF Associates Ltd all rights reserved 2012 25 OLED Components Manufacture IPR licensing for fabrication process
Application of OLED screens in an end-user product (eg TV) Fabrication equipment R&d Manufacture of Fabrication equipment R&d for production process R&d for OLED base materials,
The Displays industry value chain for e-paper production of the display screen is capital intensive,
manufacture 1) E-paper film production to e-paper screens 2) Application of E-paper in an end-user product (eg PDA) Printed circuit R&d for flexible
10.2791/13458 Abstract The objective of the study is to document the existence of innovation gaps between the EU and its main competitors in specific ICT sub-sectors namely web services,
industrial robotics and display technologies and to explore the role of government policies in Europe's future needs for innovation in information and communication technologies (ICT) through a comparison with the USA and Asian countries.
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