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Given the premise that a company is 2 technical generations ahead of its competition, is there anyway for them to protect their lead and still make their product available to the public?
I am talking about protecting their lead as an Industrial Secret, not a patent.
Note: 2 technical generations can be about 5 years in consumer electronics or as many as 25 years in something less revolutionary like bridge building. It has been a long time since the next generation [insert here] has been an actual generation away.
Possible PODs
Xerox PARC -Basically a gang of geniuses developed modern office computer technology in the 70s. They really were 5 years ahead of everybody else only Xerox was run by a bunch of copy machine salesmen who blew it. Also they had no security. Steve Jobs (or maybe it was Steve Wozniak?) was shown millions of dollars worth of free ideas, realized the value of what he saw, and later helped build Apple. So Question One can a company with a massive breakthrough protect their lead as an industrial secret?
American-Nazi Cold War. In our Cold War although there was a lot of industrial espionage, it really was not worth going into contortions to protect consumer products. Even if the Soviet's or Cold War China could reverse engineer something like the Camry neither of these countries was in a position to mass produce their own Toyota knockoffs. By the way in OTL the East German toothpaste was the stolen/reversed engineered Crest toothpaste formula so on smaller items the West did suffer. Now imagine a scenario like the novel Fatherland circa 1970 where both North America and Europe have strong modern industrial bases. How would you prevent all your R&D from pharmaceuticals to oil drilling technology from falling to the otherside? Restrict access to everything? What else could you do? Question Two without each side respecting the others patents how could you introduce anything successful without it being swiped by the Nazi Regime?