Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.

> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.

I think that's a dangerous assumption to make. Certainly it's true that for most major technologies so far, western countries were first - but that's probably mainly because China's been busy playing catch up. But now the Chinese have huge numbers of factories, suppliers big and small, machine shops, PCB fabs and experienced engineers. You really think they're not coming up with original ideas?

Any engineer will tell you a new product is a little bit of idea and a lot of execution. The Chinese are able to execute in a way that the west isn't any more.

> It's the Western companies that actually come up with the original idea, whatever good that does them.

Nah, they just had access to more capital. That hasn't been true in a while tho.

That's a generalization with some truth, but in this case it was blatantly obvious that iRobot was not putting much effort into improvement - or was not effective at improvement. They basically ignored the moat and relied on their headstart to the point that even brand new entrants to the market could equal or overtake them in an initial product offering.

And the business model aspects they relied on for their protective moat - e.g. mass commercial electronic production - was generalized and massively optimized in China (not just for vacuum robots but mass commercial electronics).