Unfortunately what they didn't do was dot the "i's" and cross the "t's" when creating and using the Department for Transport's complicated economic model for assessing franchise bids - which meant that in a judicial review of the Department's decision to go with First Group, launched by Virgin, the current holder of the franchise, the government was bound to lose.
The complicated business-model considerations for driverless cars have already kicked off an intense game of three-dimensional chess, and Google could obviously lose.
Getting stuck there is unpleasant, says Gillis, because the business model gets complicated, with no obvious advantages.
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Fathoming where and when such events will occur is too complicated for any conceivable computer model.
Disruptive innovation requires three things: a change in technology that simplifies a complicated technical problem, a business model that can take those simplified solutions to the market at low cost and a supporting cast of suppliers and distributors to reinforce the disruptor in the middle.
Our best understanding of physics so far, called the Standard Model, suggests that the complicated cascades of decay of D-mesons into other particles should be very nearly the same - within less than 0.1% - as a similar chain of antimatter decays.
But cancer is so complicated that it makes the Apollo moon landing seem like building a model airplane.
While Shell was once seen as a model of good management, some investors have in recent years criticised its complicated two-company structure: Royal Dutch Petroleum, based in the Netherlands, owns 60% of the group and London-based Shell Transport and Trading the remaining 40%, with operational management reporting to both boards.
When there are contests to award complicated long-term contracts such as this one, civil servants construct their own financial model.
First, the idea of needed to sit in front of a TV to experience a program was chipped at with VCR (which still were relatively complicated to operate) and then DVRs, which made most TV an on-demand model.
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