Fuji and Kodak

Innovators everywhere have good cause to mourn the finality of Kodak's loss of its place atop the technology heap as it filed for bankruptcy protection Thursday January 19, 2012.

Kodak's Japanese rival Fujifilm Holdings Corp., however, it doing just fine. Imagine that... a large Japanese company that outcompteted an American company primarily through innovation rather than by focusing on supply chain, efficiencies, engineering, attention to detail, and all those other typical components of "Japan Inc.'s" competitiveness.

Shigetaka Komori has run Fujifilm as its president since 2000 and as its CEO since 2003, so he was at the helm during the wrenching changes that took down Kodak. But Fujifilm took a much broader perspective on its technology assets, the future, and how to survive their unavoidable fusion.

Whereas Kodak focused primarily on converting its business from film-based to digital photograpy--it was a pioneer in digital technology--Fujifilm tooks its existing technologies and applied them to completely new markets like the ubiquitous LCD panels for devices such as the one you are now using to read this blog post. It even applied its science to cosmetics and health care markets.

"Fujifilm was able to overcome by diversifying," said Komori in a recent interview reported in the Wall Street Journal.

The lesson here is that innovation must be applied to markets and marketing as well as to technolgies if a company is to survive today's and tomorrow's rapid change.