Wharton book on Emerging Technologies - Beginning

The first thing I noticed about the preface and Chapter one is that it picked up an important topic I remember coving in my Economics course: Mature companies can hinder thier own development of emerging technologies. The authors really elaborated this subject in discussing the various circumstances that can lead a well-funded, well-managed develpopment group to fail if they aare too controoled or follow the tried-and-true thinking of their parent company. I liked how they emphasized that a balance needs to be found between the parnet company and the child company to successfully develop and market a disruptive technology. The parent-teenager analogy made teh concept easy to understand. The child company needs room to explore and grow on it's own basis, but it also needs the right amount of guidance and expertise of the parent.
Emerging technologies need to have goals and milestones to monitor their progress and to keep investors interested, but they must also be flexible to adapt to where their product or market may head.
I remember distinctly one passage that really bothered me, though. The authors mentioned the conflict between Edison and Westinghouse concerning AC and DC electrical current. How I have always understood this imoprtant aspect of the early days of electricity transmission, Nikola Tesla was an employee of Edison's and he was the first to push the idea of Alternating Current. Nikola sold this idea to his good friend Westinghouse, and there the confilcts with Edison continued. On that note, Nikola sold the AC idea to Westinghouse for royalties of $2.50 per horsepower, which he was subsequently cheated out of, even though this technology brought light (literally) to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Nikola was probably the greatest mind in history for the idealogical development of emerginf technologies. But more on that later. Hopefully something I can discuss on the class I get to present.
Although this book states clearly it does not hold the answers for developing successful emerging technologies, as most will fail, it does lay the historical framework for what has worked in the past and what has not. I think it will be a great read for this class.