Kodak was established in the late 19th century, turned into the main provider in the photography business during the 1970s, and declared becoming bankrupt in 2012. Given that Kodak’s center business was selling film, it is not difficult to perceive a reason the most recent years caused disruption in the industry. Cameras went computerized and afterward transmitted into cellphones. Individuals went from printing pictures to sharing them on the web. In some rare cases, people still print nostalgic images and occasion cards, but that volume fails to measure up to Kodak’s most productive days.
Organizations frequently see the disruptive trends influencing their industry. They habitually redirect adequate assets to partake in developing business sectors. Their mistake is usually a failure to accept the new plans of action to changes in the market. Eastman Kodak made a digital camera, put resources into the innovation, and surprisingly comprehended that photographs would be shared on the web. Regardless of that, the consecutive CEOs of the organization did not understand that online photograph sharing was the gigantic new business, not simply an approach to extend the printing industry.
Kodak altered the possibility of photography which suggested anybody could take photos with only a single press on the button. In 1935, Kodak dispatched Kodachrome, the previously hued film that was utilized in still photography and cinematography (Company Man, 2018). The business technique of Kodak followed the model where they tried selling an item with an affordable price to raise the price of a corresponding product. The customers would utilize the Kodak camera for making photos, and afterward, they were sent to the Kodak plant to be printed. The result which Kodak wanted to reach was film and printing, and not the digital camera.
If photography somehow managed to switch rapidly from the self-service technology to an entirely advanced innovation, Kodak would confront a very troublesome time. The new process of ‘capturing the moment’ was by clients taking computerized pictures, downloading them onto their PCs, altering, distributing, and saving them through the Internet to be seen electronically (Company Man, 2018). The methodology that advanced imaging was transformative as opposed to a progressive change would be the way into Kodak’s capacity to construct a solid situation in computerized innovation. As late as 2000, advanced cameras had accomplished restricted market infiltration (Company Man, 2018).
At that time, most of the photographic pictures were still taken on conventional film. Henceforth, Kodak’s marketing plan was the ambidextrous approach where Kodak presented those parts of advanced imaging that could offer really improved benefits for its clients. In this way, in the shopper centre, Kodak perceived that photography would keep on being fulfilled by the conventional film for quite a while. Nonetheless, it soon became obvious that digital imaging offered a high potential for picture taking and its transmission.
The methodology should have been to expand on and broaden that vivid market strength which is accessible to the organization and simultaneously adjust the system to serve the quickly developing, however moderately little, advanced market that was only emerging. It is not like Kodak did not offer advanced innovation to upgrade the administrations proposed by photofinishers. Accordingly, the Kodak I.Lab framework released a computerized foundation to photofinishers that digitized each film and offered better pictures by fixing regular issues in purchaser’s photos (Grant, 2019). The company had high dynamic capabilities to apply advanced cameras at the right time. Fisher, the CEO of Kodak in 1993-2000, perceived their latent capacity and pushed Kodak to set itself up in this profoundly serious market (Company Man, 2018).
Together with expensive computerized single-reflex focal point cameras for proficient use, Kodak was the one who constructed the QuickTake camera for Apple Inc (Grant, 2019). The organization needed to apply a computerized framework to make the way toward utilizing their printing administrations simpler (Nunan, 2017). However, a frameworks approach perceived that most buyers had neither the time nor the patience to understand guidelines and to incorporate various gadgets and programming to print their photos.
Kodak had the greatest opportunity of all company in the market to move from designing, and printing frameworks to the digital distributing, grouping of pictures, and their comfortable storage. Kodak’s chance was to use the progress from conventional image printing to advanced, colorful, variable imaging. It had several advantages over other similar organizations such as Kodak’s restrictive inkjet innovation and its initiative in diverse capturing of the data (Nunan, 2017). Nonetheless, its focal business product were printers. The organization took a direction towards the printing business, building costly printers and modest ink.
The organization’s center item was the film and printing photographs, not the camera. It decided not to retain digital technology for longer. This vision only illustrated Eastman Kodak’s poor knowledge management (Grant, 2019). Otherwise, the effective use of the knowledge its experts had could help them timely react to the innovative changes in the world. They were too optimistic about their approach and did not see the irrelevance of their technology to the modern world and demand.
Kodak made an advanced camera, put resources into the innovation, and surprisingly comprehended that photographs would be shared on the web. Where they fizzled was in understanding that online photograph sharing was the new business, not simply an approach to extend the printing business.
Kodak’s absence of vital inventiveness drove it to confuse the actual profession and sort of industry that it was working in, which was subsequently crushed with a key move towards the advanced age. Kodak evaded risky choices and rather created methodology and approaches to keep their historical image (Grant, 2019). Even when the mistake was realized, and the income was steadily falling, the company’s crisis management was not effective, and it was not able to adapt to the world trends.
In a position of a CEO of Kodak, I would change the way the organization sees the system, plans of action, and advancement of the board. The business should have been set up to move from securing its upper hands to making management progressive. Spotting something and implicating it in business are altogether different things. Along these lines, another clarification is that Kodak knew about the potential innovation but did not invest into it. Thus, investing more in the development and marketing of digital cameras rather than printers would be a successful strategy. The company already had projects such as Ofoto, which had a great potential in becoming a leading provider of picture sharing over the internet. However, none of those made the managers and data scientists of Kodak move towards these projects. They used them only as tools to promote their long-renown chemical industry.
References
Company Man. (2018). The Decline of Kodak.What Happened? [YouTube Video]. Web.
Grant, R. M. (2019). Contemporary strategy analysis text and cases (10th ed.). Wiley.
Nunan, D. (2017). Reflections on the Future of the Market Research Industry: Is Market Research having its ‘Kodak Moment’?. International Journal of Market Research, 59(5), 553–555. Web.