One Company Planned it’s Future. The Other One Made Theirs.

Let me tell you a story about two companies, one that saw the future coming and one that decided to make a different one.

By the 1960s and early 1970s, Polaroid was one of America’s great consumer technology companies. It dominated instant photography, held a monopoly in that category and had become a major force in the broader film and camera markets. Its appeal was obvious. In an era when most photography still required film processing and delay, Polaroid gave ordinary people a finished photograph in about sixty seconds. It felt like magic. In 1972, the company introduced the SX-70, one of the most iconic instant cameras ever made.
And then it all came apart.

What happened is often misremembered. Polaroid didn’t fail because it was blindsided by digital imaging. The company had been researching digital imaging since the 1960s, formed an electronic imaging group in 1981 and by 1989 was spending 42 percent of its R&D budget on digital imaging. By the late 1990s, it was even a top seller of digital cameras. The failure was not technical ignorance. It was strategic belief. Polaroid’s leadership continued to assume that customers would always want hard-copy prints and that the company’s future economics would still be rooted in film and chemistry. It planned for a future that still looked too much like its past. When the market moved on, Polaroid could not move fast enough with it. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and the post-reorganization company filed again in 2008.

Now contrast that with Fujifilm. Like Polaroid and Kodak, Fujifilm understood photographic film deeply. But when digital imaging began destroying the economics of film, Fujifilm did not treated that reality as a starting point. The company had already built diversification muscle memory over decades, including document solutions through Fuji Xerox. It expanded further into medical systems, data storage, advanced materials and information-related businesses. Then it looked harder at the underlying capabilities developed in film. Fujifilm’s own materials describe four film-related technologies that became important in cosmetics: collagen research, light analysis and control, antioxidation and nanotechnology. In 2006 the company entered cosmetics, and in 2007 it launched ASTALIFT, which has since grown into a global brand. Fujifilm didn’t discovery it was secretly a cosmetics company. It was willing to ask a harder question than most incumbents do: what do we actually know how to do and where else might that matter, whether in our industry or not?

That is the real Polaroid-Fujifilm contrast. Polaroid saw the disruption, invested in digital and still remained trapped by assumptions about what customers would value and how the company would make money. Fujifilm also saw the disruption, but it was willing to redefine the business around transferable capabilities rather than defend the old format to the death. One company planned for a future that still resembled the present. The other used a collapsing core business as a forcing function to build a different future.