Communication Innovation History Lesson

Dear Reader,
we have been all along talking on communication - so much so that almost everyone thinks they are good if not experts at / in it.

Well here's something to chew on;

Happy Chewing,
Regards,
A.S.Prasad.


"Long before digital tools enabled us to easily broadcast messages, photocopies were the most efficient way to distribute information to groups of all sizes. Community letters, inter-office bulletins, fliers for events and even Christmas letters inside holiday cards were all made possible by the automated copying machine.

The office copier turned 50 recently which provides us the opportunity to take a look back and see how one large company lost revenue due to this innovation while a little firm grew into a FORTUNE 500 company and prospered.

In the 1950s, Kodak owned the paper copy business using a photo sensitive paper and monobath solution to create an extra copy of a document. When Chester Carlson, a physicist and patent attorney who obtained the xerography patent and looked for companies who could commercialize the technology, came calling on Eastman Kodak leadership, he was turned down. Kodak's assessment was building such a copier would be very expensive, require continuous service support and their marketing management had seldom heard of a customer who needed more than one copy at a time. Kodak's leadership, unwilling to obsolete its photographic copy machine's revenue stream, concluded that the xerography process had no future in the office copying market.

Carlson then went over to the Haloid Company, also located in Rochester, NY (the company later changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958) with his new technology where he was welcomed. Haloid Xerox then formed a joint venture with Battelle Development Corporation (BDC) in Columbus, OH, for 55% of the patient rights, to invest and develop the xerography technology resulting in three technical improvements.


In 1962, Xerox Corporation (the new name for the Haloid Xerox with Battelle owning $350 million of Xerox stock) introduced the Xerox 914 (so named because it could copy a 9-by-14 inch document), a revolutionary new copier that cost $15,000 each.

Of course, people could make print copies before the introduction of the 914. There were printing presses for books and newspapers, carbon copies and Kodak's device that used photo sensitive paper and a monobath solution. However, the xerography process used photoconductivity and light to produce copies on plain, untreated paper.

Prior to the product introduction, Joe Wilson, Haloid Company president, had come up with an innovative marketing approach for this new expensive copier that led to the success of xerography: Lease the 914 copier for only $100 per month and charge the customer an additional $.01 for each copy made on the machine. The result was Xerox sold more than 200,000 of the 914 machines before retiring the model while Kodak's paper copier business quickly vanished.

"It was a democratizing technology," says Stephen P. Hoover, vice president of global software solutions for Xerox, because it "gave people access to information and capabilities they just didn't have. It really changed how work was done."

What leadership lesson did you take away from reading this story?

Sources:- [Battelle, Columbus, OH and FORTUNE, February 8, 2010]