Success Can Kill Creativity Faster Than Just About Anything

Strangely success can cripple creativity and innovation, even faster than failure. Kodak was the world’s leader in cameras, with 90 percent of the market in the late seventies, but by the nineties, digital was booming. With too much at stake in its film paper products, Kodak’s success dragged it down. Kodak was the first to invent the digital camera as early as 1975. However, rather than exploit his creation, Kodak instead chose to suppress it, understanding the threat it posed to its other core income. Realizing their mistake far too late, Kodak released the first-ever Wi-Fi camera in 2005, which allowed people to e-mail pictures to others. Still, Kodak failed to develop it further and instead allowed competitors to profit from their idea. By 2012 Kodak was bankrupt.

From Record Sales to Broke in Just Six Years

Smith Corona typewriters, founded in 1886, was, for a hundred years, the world’s leader in typewriters. In 1989 they grossed over 500 million in sales which was a lot of money back then. They even invented the portable laptop computer that spell-checked and printed a decade before anyone else but didn’t think it would catch on, and so they ditched it. Instead, they focused all their efforts on moving to Mexico to cut the production costs of their typewriters. They were bankrupt just six years later.