Kodak The Kodak problem, on the surface, is that it did not move into the digital world well enough and fast enough. Recent articles dig a bit more and find that there were people who saw the problem coming people buried in the organization but the firm did not act when it should have, which is decades ago. Kodak faced the technological discontinuities challenge, first clearly articulated by my colleague Clay Christensen: a new technology has fierce competitors, low margins and cannibalizes your high margin core business. And Kodak did not take decisive action to combat the inevitable challenges. Everyone thinks of all this in terms of strategic decisions either avoided or made poorly. What no one seems to do is go back and ask: Why did Kodak make the poor strategic decisions they made? In 1993 they brought in from the outside a technology expert to be CEO. GeorgeFisher was believed to be almost as good as Jack Welch or Lou Gerstner. Great CEO, people buried in the hierarchy who had all sorts of good ideas, and still poor strategic decisions. Why? The organization overflowed with complacency. I saw it, maybe in the late 1980s. Kodak was failing to keep up even before the digital revolution when Fuji started doing a better job with the old technology, the roll-film business. With the complacency so rock-solid, and no one at the top even devoting their priorities toward turning that problem into a huge urgency around a huge opportunity, of course they went nowhere. Of course strategy sessions with the BIG CEO went nowhere. Of course all the people buried in the hierarchy who saw the oncoming problems and had ideas for solutions made no progress. Their bosses and peers ignored them.

a) Why research and development (R&D) is a crucial part in commercialization? Discuss 5 (FIVE) aspects and reflect to the failures of Kodak. (15 marks)