I was pleased to see the company holding to its innovative values of arts and culture. The book also informed me that Polaroid still exists, with about thirty employees. While Land may have been an innovator, he did not lay a solid succession plan for Polaroid (The book’s later chapters offer an analysis of Polaroid’s fall from dominance.). Of course, Polaroid fell from dominance in the move toward digital photography. Bonanos mentions how even as early as 2003, OutKast’s “Shake it like a Polaroid picture” could be a taken-for-granted lyric. I am not a photographer, and Polaroid is just a fog of memory from my youth. Sometimes only when we are slow do we become detached enough from the problem to reframe it. Sure, that was sixty years ago, before the digital economy forced everything to, well, instant speed. “We created an environment where a man was expected to sit and think for two years,” Land said. Land’s introspective management style meant there was a lot of sitting around, waiting. We think that innovation must run at break-neck speed to succeed. But every innovation should change how people think and create - a social endeavor. Maybe not every innovation will catch the attention of its generation’s most famous artists. Rather than demanding customers use the product correctly, Polaroid embraced the bohemian arts scene built on the medium. But was this really so obvious? Polaroid was much more intentional about making photography a social enterprise than their larger rival, Kodak.Īrtists took advantage of the unique chemistry and materials involved with Polaroid’s instant photography. Polaroid was of course in the business which made a natural partnership with artists. Land was not afraid to engage the culture and change society’s perception of photography. It sounds bombastic to say, but innovation is not just an economic but a cultural enterprise. Land understood that innovation needs design, and design needs the liberal arts. It’s so counterintuitive to the utility-maximizing engineering thinking we are so used to. “You know, they used to invent jobs for people,” she explains. This is not the sort of project that corporations typically hand to 22-year-olds, but Perry says it was not all that unusual at Polaroid. When Holly French (now Sarah Hollis Perry) was hired in 1957, Morse sent her a memo saying that her chief assignment was “the study of how to make our kind of photography an indigenous American art.” She was expected to do so by engaging the residents of an entire small town to take pictures and see what they came up with. Instead, Land set his graduates on the winding journey of design: Befriending an art history professor at the all-girls’ Smith College, Land hired recent graduates at the entry level with no background in chemistry, marketing, or other skills you’d assume one would need to work at a massive corporation like Polaroid. For the other half, design, Land embraced the liberal arts like few entrepreneurs. Polaroid constructed engineering marvels, including a film factory in Massachusetts that is still the stuff of legend in photography circles.Įngineering, though, is only part of the equation for innovation. It’s too easy to dismiss the importance of design as the dismissal of engineering. Land knew that true innovations come from sterile labs or tailored focus groups but instead from the imaginations of the most creative teams he could assemble. Land was innovating in the 1950s using techniques that would only decades later be known as design thinking. I was unaware of the fantastic history of this company and its visionary founder, Edwin Land. And, over my 4th of July break I ran into a wonderful case study of design and innovation in Christopher Bonanos’s Instant: The Story of Polaroid. It’s been quiet on the blog - I have been hard at work in graduate school.įortunately, my program emphasizes topics like innovation and design thinking, ideas that are rife with applications to everyday life.
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