January 18, 2009
The Economist describes how the current strength of the the jet engine business come about. An understanding of the firm’s success requires some understanding of the technology that goes into its civil-aircraft engines. This is not just Rolls-Royce’s biggest business, it is also the one that both felled the company in 1971 and proved to be its salvation two decades later, Rolls-Royce’s triumph was not to build a slightly better engine and thus earn a temporary technological edge, but to design a completely different one. Remarkably, it did so from a position of weakness.
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