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In 1977 Edwin Land unveiled Polavision, an instant home-movie system that was a real technical feat. Land pushed it through on personal conviction over internal doubts, the product failed commercially, Polaroid took a large write-off (roughly $68 million in 1979), and Land left the CEO role soon afterward.
Land held that market research cannot measure demand for something customers have never seen. People can only describe their wants in terms of existing products. So the inventor's job is to make something so plainly desirable that the market forms around it, as happened when the first instant camera sold out on its first day at Jordan Marsh in 1948.
Land's rule for choosing projects was to take on only work that is obviously worth doing and extremely hard to do. The importance secures commitment and funding. The difficulty keeps competitors out and makes the result defensible, since nobody else is likely to attempt it.
The best-known example is the 1972 shareholder meeting where he pulled the SX-70 from his pocket and shot several pictures in seconds. Because the product's value was visible the moment it was used, marketing meant engineering the moment of first sight.