The Failure Of Eastman Kodak

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This essay proposes to discuss why the successful firms failed because of the disruptive technology. The theory of ‘disruptive technology’ from Christensen and Rosenbloom (1995) will be used as the most important notion to clarify the purpose of this essay. The notion of disruptive technology will be introduced first. And then, according to Christensen and Rosenbloom’s understanding of the disruptive technology, the main content will state how the successful firms failed from 3 aspects, which are the lagged technology these firms owned, the low dynamic capabilities of respond to the disruptive technology and how they ignored disruptive technology. Meanwhile, the case study of Kodak will supplement to each aspect. The term of ‘disruptive technology’ was first coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen and he suggested that it is a new technology that unexpectedly replaces the existed technology (Techtarget.com 2006). Carefully speaking, this kind of innovation means another different value network to the existed one and generates a niche market, which will eventually disrupt the existing value network and market (Wikipedia.org 2011). The explanation suggests that the disruptive technology is obviously a threat to the incumbent successful firms. It is undoubted that most successful firms have failed to compete with the entrant firms because of the disruptive technology. The new technology will make the existing technology to be useless and redundancy. The first issue about failure of some successful firms is their laggard technology. It is obviously that the new technology always substitutes to the previous technology. Christensen and Rosenbloom (1995) has pointed out that with ‘the emergence of some new technological paradigm’, the prior technology of the incumbent firm is unable to compete with the capabilities of new technology paradigm,

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