Digital Photography: Kodak
The Big Picture That Kodak Missed
In this episode of unNatural Selection, we hear from Steven Sasson, the inventor of the first handheld digital camera—created at Kodak in 1975. At the time, Kodak was a powerhouse in photography, with over 100,000 employees and a dominant global brand. But rather than embrace Sasson’s invention, Kodak saw it as a threat to its lucrative film and paper business.
Celebrated today with awards including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation—personally awarded by President Obama—Sasson shares the remarkable story of how a transformative idea was met with resistance inside one of the world’s most innovative companies, and how Kodak’s failure to act on digital photography ultimately led to its dramatic decline. This is a powerful cautionary tale in corporate survival—about groundbreaking innovation, and the corporate inertia that resisted it.
