Leapfrog – Page 2 – artdiamondblog.com

Bose Leapfrogs the Competition in Defense of Your Peace and Quiet

“The Bose QuietComfort 15 has refined circuitry and redesigned earcaps.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) . . . , if your sales are getting eaten alive by cheaper rivals, and you don’t want to play the price game, you have only one option: play leapfrog. Make your gadget so much better than the me-toos that people will be willing to pay your premium once again.

That’s the idea behind Bose’s new QuietComfort 15 model ($300), which replaces the QuietComfort 2.
. . .
First, the QC15 model really, truly does advance the art of noise cancellation — big time. The QC 2 headphones and my Panasonics cut the airplane roar by half. But the 15 reduced it by, say, 85 percent, leaving only a distant, whispery whoosh to remind you that you’re in an aluminum tube 39,000 feet up in the air. Taking them off after a while, as you’ll want to do because your ears get sweaty, is like walking into a rock concert when you’ve been outside the building.

For the full story, see:
DAVID POGUE. “State of the Art; Ho Ho Ho? You Won’t Hear a Thing.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 3, 2009): B1 & B8.
(Note: the online version of the article is “State of the Art; Bose’s Latest Headphones Can Quell the Clangor” and is dated December 2, 2009.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Electric Mitsubishis and Nissans May Leapfrog Hybrid Toyotas

(p. B6) Both Nissan and Mitsubishi have their own reasons for rushing out an all-electric car. Having invested little in hybrids, they hope to leapfrog straight to the next technology.
. . .
“You don’t see many competing technologies survive in a key market for very long,” said Mr. Shimizu, the Keio University professor.
And more often than not in the history of innovation, a change in the dominant technology means a change in the market leader.
“Electric cars are a disruptive technology, and Toyota knows that,” Mr. Shimizu said. “I wouldn’t say Toyota is killing the electric vehicle. Perhaps Toyota is scared.”

For the full story, see:
HIROKO TABUCHI. “The Electric Slide.” The New York Times (Thursday, August 20, 2009): B1 & B6.
(Note: The online version of the article had the title: “Toyota, Hybrid Innovator, Holds Back in Race to Go Electric.”)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Benefits from the Discovery of Sulfa, the First Antibiotic

I quoted a review of The Demon Under the Microscope in an entry from October 12, 2006. I finally managed to read the book, last month.
I don’t always agree with Hager’s interpretation of events, and his policy advice, but he writes well, and he has much to say of interest about how the first anti-bacterial antibiotic, sulfa, was developed.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be highlighting a few key passages of special interest. In today’s entry, below, Hager nicely summarizes the importance of the discovery of antibiotics for his (and my) baby boom generation.

(p. 3) I am part of that great demographic bulge, the World War II “Baby Boom” generation, which was the first in history to benefit from birth from the discovery of antibiotics. The impact of this discovery is difficult to overstate. If my parents came down with an ear infection as babies, they were treated with bed rest, painkillers, and sympathy. If I came down with an ear infection as a baby, I got antibiotics. If a cold turned into bronchitis, my parents got more bed rest and anxious vigilance; I got antibiotics. People in my parents’ generation, as children, could and all too often did die from strep throats, infected cuts, scarlet fever, meningitis, pneumonia, or any number of infectious diseases. I and my classmates survived because of antibiotics. My parents as children, and their parents before them, lost friends and relatives, often at very early ages, to bacterial epidemics that swept through American cities every fall and winter, killing tens of thousands. The suddenness and inevitability of these epidemic deaths, facts of life before the 1930s, were for me historical curiosities, artifacts of another age. Antibiotics virtually eliminated them. In many cases, much-feared diseases of my grandparents’ day—erysipelas, childbed fever, cellulitis—had become so rare they were nearly extinct. I never heard the names.

Source:
Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

Leapfrog Competition in the Smartphone Industry

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) In recent years Palm lost its way. Its share of the smartphone market has been halved to about 16.9 percent over the last two years. First, Research in Motion found the sweet spot of business users with its BlackBerry. More recently, Apple grabbed consumers’ fancy with the iPhone.

Palm has tried to innovate beyond the five-year-old Treo with little effect. It announced with great fanfare last year that it would build the Foleo, a cross between a smartphone and notebook computer, only to cancel the project three months later. While cellphone makers like Samsung, LG and R.I.M. brought out products to compete with the iPhone, Palm has told Treo loyalists and investors to be patient. They will need to be. Palm’s stock price is down 90 percent since its high in March 2000.
Mr. Rubinstein, the executive chairman, said he is convinced he can bring Palm back. “Everyone is trying to make an iPhone killer,” he said. “We are trying to make a killer Palm product.”

For the full story, see:
LAURA M. HOLSON. “Palm, Once a Leader, Seeks Path in Smartphone Jungle.” The New York Times (Weds., August 20, 2008): C1 & C5.

“Ed Colligan, left, Palm’s chief executive, and Jon Rubinstein, the executive chairman, who was hired to revive the company.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

L.E.D.’s as the Next Leapfrog Advance in Light

A few years ago I presented a paper at the meetings of Society for Social Studies of Science in which I mentioned Nordhaus’s wonderful paper in which he measures advances in technology that produce illumination. Some of the technologies represent leapfrog advances that are part of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.
At the end of my presentation, a member of the audience gave me a reference to the new L.E.D. light technology that he suggested was the next leapfrog advance. (Alas, I do not remember his name.)

(p. C3) L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced standard bulbs in many of the nation’s traffic lights. Indeed, the red, green and yellow signals are — aside from the tiny blinking red light on a DVD player, a cellphone or another electronic device — probably the most familiar application of the technology.

But it is showing up in more prominent spots. The ball that descends in Times Square on New Year’s Eve is illuminated with L.E.D.’s. And the managers of the Empire State Building are considering a proposal to light it with L.E.D. fixtures, which would allow them to remotely change the building’s colors to one of millions of variations.
. . .
The problem, though, is the price. A standard 60-watt incandescent usually costs less than $1. An equivalent compact fluorescent is about $2. But in Europe this September, Philips, the Dutch company dealing in consumer electronics, health care machines and lighting, is to introduce the Ledino, its first L.E.D. replacement for a standard incandescent. Priced at $107 a bulb, it is unlikely to have more than a few takers.
“L.E.D. performance is there, but the price is not,” said Kevin Dowling, a Philips Lighting vice president . . .
. . .
“The Marcus Center lighting will require no maintenance for 15 years,” Mr. Gregory said. “That’s a dream for a lighting designer.”
But he does not expect standard bulbs to disappear totally. Just as the invention of the light bulb did not completely kill the candle and kerosene lamp markets, Mr. Gregory said, “there will always be a need for incandescent bulbs. They will never totally go away.”
“The way an incandescent bulb plays on the face on a Broadway makeup mirror,” he said, “you can never duplicate that.”

For the full story, see:
ERIC A. TAUB. “Fans of L.E.D.’s Say This Bulb’s Time Has Come.” The New York Times (Mon., July 28, 2008): C3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference to the Nordhaus paper is:
Nordhaus, William D. “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Light Suggests Not.” In The Economics of New Goods, edited by Robert J. Gordon and Timothy F. Bresnahan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press for National Bureau of Economic Research, 1997, pp. 29-66.

“The full spectrum of color, design and programming available for the Times Square ball.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

“Leapfrog Over the Other Players in Their Industry”

(p. 152) The early market is driven by the demands of visionaries for offerings that create dramatic competitive advantages of the sort that would allow them to leapfrog over the other players in their industry.

Source:
Moore, Geoffrey A. Living on the Fault Line: Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2000.

Leapfrog Competition Among Three Firms in Jet-Engine Oligopoly

“Pratt & Whitney hopes its Geared Turbo Fan engine will defy skeptics and win it a spot on the next generation of jets from Boeing and Airbus.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Once every 20 years or so, the companies that make jet engines battle it out for a chance to power the next generation of single-aisle airplanes.
. . .
General Electric Co. unveiled plans to develop a new family of engine cores that it said would vault it ahead of United Technologies Corp.’s Pratt & Whitney, which has a two-year head start on a novel engine that promises to burn 12% less fuel than today’s best engines.
GE, which is working with French partner Safran SA, said its engine will have fewer moving parts than Pratt & Whitney’s, and will deliver equal or better performance. “We’ve been pretty quiet for the last couple of years, but we’ve been doing plenty of work in secret,” said GE Aviation President David Joyce, in an interview. “So be it. Game on.”
. . .
Besides GE and Pratt & Whitney, the other major player in the industry is Britain’s Rolls-Royce PLC. Hoping to dominate the market, all three companies plan to spend well over $1 billion on their new engines, stretching the limits of their technology. Developing fuel-efficient engines requires the use of exotic alloys and ceramic coatings that can cope with internal engine temperatures that would be above the melting points of untreated metal components.
The next generation of engines may look radically different from those used today. One design that GE and Rolls-Royce are exploring separately would have a double row of propellers at the (p. B3) back end of the engine, with no protective covering. Such an engine would be noisier and significantly slower than today’s planes. It also would have to be mounted at the rear of the airplane, but the companies say it would consume as much as 24% less fuel.
. . .
Pratt & Whitney had hoped to get a boost in the engine race by promoting a design called the Geared Turbo Fan. It uses a gearbox at the front of the engine that allow various fans and compressors to turn at different speeds for greater efficiency and less noise. . . .
. . .
The company has been working on the gear technology for almost 20 years, investing almost $1 billion so far, Mr. Finger said. He said that in addition to fuel and emissions savings, the new engine will cut noise by a factor of two and reduce maintenance by 40% because it will have fewer moving parts throughout the engine.

For the full story, see:
J. LYNN LUNSFORD and DANIEL MICHAELS. “Jet-Engine Makers Launch New War; Billions of Dollars at Stake in Race To Develop Efficient Power Source For Next Wave of Boeing, Airbus Planes.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., July 14, 2008): B1 & B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

“GE is creating an engine with fewer moving parts than Pratt & Whitney’s design, and seeks to deliver equal or better performance.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Venter’s Use of ESTs “Leapfrogged” his X-Chromosome Proposal

(p. 82) Venter dubbed the fragments “expressed sequence tags,” or ESTs for short.
. . .
Venter was ecstatic. He had veered wildly off course from his approved plan of research, but the risk had paid off. While the Human Genome Project grant committee was still dragging its feet over his X-chromosome proposal, he had already leapfrogged ahead of that idea and found a way to go forward even faster, using his ESTs. Venter wrote Watson to let him know what he was up to, hoping to win his approval and some funding to continue the EST project.

Reference to book:
Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

McCain Proposes Prize to “Leapfrog” Battery Technology

“Campaigning Monday in Fresno, Calif., Senator John McCain said, if elected, he would offer $300 million to anyone who could build a more efficient car battery.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) FRESNO, Calif. — In the 18th century the British offered a £20,000 prize to anyone who figured out how to calculate longitude. More recently, Netflix offered a million dollars for improving movie recommendations on its Web site. Now Senator John McCain is suggesting a new national prize: He said here Monday that if elected president he would offer $300 million to anyone who could build a better car battery.
. . .
“I further propose we inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people,” Mr. McCain said, “by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”
He said the winner should deliver power at 30 percent of current costs. “That’s one dollar, one dollar, for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency,” he said.

For the full story, see:

MICHAEL COOPER. “McCain Proposes a $300 Million Prize for a Next-Generation Car Battery.” The New York Times (Tues., June 24, 2008): A15 & A20.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Leapfrog-type Competition”

Below is the abstract of a paper that mentions “leapfrog-type competition.” Appendix 2 of the paper (pp. 143-144) attempts to set down a mathematical model of leapfrog competition.

(p. 135) This paper examines competition patterns and competitive strategies when technology changes continually. It first discusses optimal behavior for investment in technology. It is argued that although technological innovations supersede existing technologies, there are economically justifiable barriers to investing in the new technologies. These economic barriers, coupled with continuous technological change, have implications for certain aspects of strategy, such as entry by means of new technologies, timing of entry, leapfrog-type competition, vertical integration, the productivity dilemma, and escalating commitment. Finally, the industrial transformation of the steel industry is used as an example to illustrate these implications.

The reference for the paper is:
Tang, Ming-Je, and S. Zannetos Zenon. “Competition under Continuous Technological Change.” Managerial and Decision Economics 13, no. 2 (Mar.-Apr. 1992): 135-48.