4 ideas
In 1943 in Santa Fe, Edwin Land's three-year-old daughter Jennifer asked why she couldn't see the photo he had just taken of her. Land worked out the core idea of in-camera developing chemistry on a walk that afternoon. Five years later, in November 1948, the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 went on sale at Jordan Marsh in Boston and sold out its first day.
Polaroid sold cameras cheaply and made its profits on proprietary film packs, a consumable that customers had to keep buying. That model made the company rich, and it also made digital imaging look like a threat to the profit engine rather than an opportunity.
When Kodak entered instant photography in 1976, Polaroid sued for patent infringement. In 1985 the court ruled that Kodak had infringed, and Kodak was forced to leave the market and buy back millions of its cameras from owners.
Land ran Polaroid around staged reveals of 'magical' products, most famously pulling the folding SX-70 from his jacket at the 1972 annual meeting and firing off photos in seconds. The same founder conviction then produced Polavision, an instant-movie system launched in 1977 just as video camcorders arrived. Its failure led to Land's exit in 1982. The instinct to build what customers didn't know they wanted can't tell a leap ahead from a leap into a dead end.