JD on EP

First, two business quotes from a 2006 profile of the Polaroid corporation's difficulties:

"Polaroid built up huge technology, a skilled workforce, and a wonderful customer base, and lost it all," said Adrian J. Slywotzky , a director of Mercer Management Consulting in Boston, who recalls wanting to work for the company when he graduated from Harvard Business School in 1980. "Its story has a lot of meaning. It raises the question: If I'm great at one technology cycle, why is there an 80 percent chance that I'm not going to be around two cycles from now?"

... For Slywotzky, who advises companies on changing markets, the lesson from Polaroid is the need to manage transition by "double betting" on current and emerging technologies. "The moment of transition is the moment of maximum peril for companies," he said.

Snippets from the NAS biography:

Later, Land recalled, "You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components." On another occasion, he said, "If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it."

Land worked with relentless optimism: "An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off."

He said that "one of my main purposes was to have a camera that's part of you, that's always with you." He wanted most amateurs "to get as good as professionals because it would enlarge their horizons." Doing this, millions of photographers would gain "a feeling of personal identification with the world in the way that photography has always hoped to do."

Throughout, Land emphasized the need to identify basic needs and imagine a system to meet them: "There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically--we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!"

The enterprise Land led for half a century was less a business than an institution focused on making significant inventions. In 1975, he told a press interviewer, "Every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention."

Land argued that "neither the intuition of the sales manager nor even the first reaction of the public is a reliable measure of the value of a product to the consumer. Very often the best way to find out whether something is worth making is to make it, distribute it, and then to see, after the product has been around a few years, whether it was worth the trouble."

The world, Land understood, was not necessarily friendly to a scientist who wished to operate this way. "Most large industrial concerns," he lamented in 1945, "are limited by policy to special directions of expansion within the well-established field of the company. On the other hand, most small companies do not have the resources or the facilities to support 'scientific prospecting.' Thus the young man leaving the university with a proposal for a new kind of activity is frequently not able to find a matrix for the development of his ideas in any established industrial organization."

Land prophesied that "the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company, and that this new company is the frontier for the next generation." In the "next and best phase of the Industrial Revolution," Land expected businesses to be "scientific, social, and economic" units on the periphery of big cities and in the countryside, which will be "vigorously creative in pure science" with contributions comparable to those of universities. The career of the pure scientist, he expected, would be "as much in the corporation laboratory as in the university." He said this at a forum on the future of industrial research in 1944, just four years after he had been named, with Irving Langmuir, Edwin Armstrong, and others, as one of the most significant innovators of the previous twenty-five years. He was already working on instant photography.

In the small company Land had in mind "an industrial group of about fifty scientists," studying intensely the recent advances in "newly available polyamide molecules, the cyclotron, radar technics," color photography, and enzymology. If the industrial scientists were "inspired by curiosity" about such fields and determined "to make something new and useful," they could "invent and develop an important new field in about two years."

A small science-based enterprise depends vitally on patents, and Land eloquently defended the temporary monopolies created by the patent system from the charge, made particularly sharply during the New Deal, that it stifled innovation. Land asked, "Who can object to such monopolies? Who can object to a monopoly when there are several thousands of them? Who can object to a monopoly when every few years the company enjoying the monopoly revises, alters, perhaps even discards its product, in order to supply a superior one to the public? Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?"