Resiliency in Innovation
I came across this article several weeks ago and it caught my attention because I am always fascinated by failure, especially in large and long-standing businesses. Kodak was a powerhouse behind the film industry and was pretty much the Google of its time. Kodak was in business for over a century but fell with the rise of digital technology. The irony was that Kodak’s engineer, Sasson, actually created the first digital camera. However, Sasson’s invention was dismissed and the execs failed to leverage into the unknown.
Kodak was great at understanding their own value proposition of existing products (aka core innovation). However, they were not so great with unexplored territory, or mystery as Roger Martin might call it. Roger Martin was the Dean of Rotman School of Management between 1998-2003, he emphasized the requirement of design thinking to create successful and resilient business models. Martin talks describes design thinking as a progression from mystery, to heuristic, to algorithm, to code. For example, mystery for Kodak could have been creating something like chairs that would help people sit better so they could take better portraits (I am literally making this up now). In the heuristic stage, Kodak would know what type of chairs do well in the market and this would help define an algorithm to produce chairs for specific market segments. Finally, Kodak would fully automate this (code) process with computers and machines such that it would only require minimal human resources to operate.
The moral of this story is that Kodak stuck to core innovation, and not so much the other two. They did dab into adjacent innovation, but was absent in transformational innovation. In essence, transformational innovation embraces design thinking by braving into the unknown. Of course, Kodak’s situation is not as simple as I have made it, but I am exploring this at a high level. Imagine if Kodak actually worked to create a new future with Sasson’s invention, imagine if they had the capability to step into new territory, how would that have changed their future and legacy?
