New Beginnings

One of the tasks the other interns and I have had to work on over the past two weeks was to develop a scorecard to be used to evaluate the businesses we’ve been working with this summer. Part of the purpose of the scorecard is to be able to assess which of the current clients would be appropriate for continuing on into the incubator LAUNCH is looking to begin this fall.

One of the criteria we established for measurement is “Business model is scaled to opportunity.” So this is a measure of how the business plan has been structured to either take advantage of the full market available to the company and it’s product or service, or whether it’s structured to just be grown slowly over time to allow for the business owner to conveniently grow it while maintaining his or her other responsibilities in life. So if you’re making a new kind of widget, are you setting yourself up to be able to sell to all the companies that could benefit from your widget? Or are you structuring the plan so you can make enough widgets in your spare time, after work and on weekends, and gradually, over time, maybe, move up and service the whole market?

Our discussion of this criteria has really opened my eyes. Part of what an accelerator like LAUNCH is there to do is to help entrepreneurs and inventors see the big picture and to lay out the opportunities for growth. One of the questions we asked one of our current clients was: “What would it take to address the scale of the need, not just the scale of the need of the business to survive as a company?”

So in that particular case, the answer was to possibly hire a salesperson or two, and possibly seek outside investment. The difference, in terms of potential customers, was between a few hundred versus 7,000. The particular product in question would benefit pediatric, neuromuscular, and geriatric physical therapy patients. A large motivation for the inventor is to be able to help as many people as he can with his device. With that in mind, scaling the business model to its greatest potential is aimed more at actual patient benefits rather than an explicit profit motive.

When I first heard about Kodak filing for bankruptcy, I skimmed over the headline without clicking the link to read the full story. I just assumed the company had missed out on the digital photography opportunity, and that was the end of the story.

But I found out the other day that the company actually invented digital photography, but management ordered the projects scrapped in order to continue the focus on film.

“This tells you, it’s all about management,” Casey Leaman, one of the LAUNCH accelerator coaches told us interns.

I’ve since done some digging and found out the following, which is pretty darned interesting:

Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975 and patented numerous digital technologies. Afraid that digital would cannibalize their film photography business, they never pushed those products after bringing their first digital camera to market in 1995.  Those patents are estimated to be worth $2 billion today.

In 2005, Kodak created the first WiFi camera that allowed you to share photos without having to first connect to a computer. Unfortunately, people weren’t ready for that technology, yet, and the camera didn’t sell. Kodak killed the line.

As anyone who has read Theodore Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” will tell you, Kodak failed to realize that it wasn’t in the film photography business, it was in the photography business. It didn’t adapt to the changing innovation in its industry, which it had actually invented.

Sources:

• “How Kodak Squandered Every Single Digital Opportunity it Had” – Mashable.com
• “Kodak Failed by Asking the Wrong Marketing Question” – Forbes.com