That this an interesting thought. I am not sure it is really a classical competitive advantage, though. It's actually the first time I hear this. Is it really applicable in that many cases? You were giving Google as an example. Which algorithm were you referring to? I can think of these three from the top of my head: PageRank, MapReduce, Paxos. Of these only PageRank is what I would consider an substantial competitive advantage, but it had actually been published in an academic paper by Larry and Sergey.

I think Larry Page said on occasion that the early competitive advantage of Google was that the two founders were doing their PhD on how to build a search engine, so they simply knew much more about it than anyone else. Reading published papers about algorithms is all fine and well, but you having the intuitions to come up with them is much more powerful.