Innovating Out of Crisis
Fujifilm CEO memoir; the counterfactual to Kodak. Open Library unreachable.
Summary
Shigetaka Komori became chief executive of Fujifilm in 2000, as demand for photographic film began falling by roughly twenty per cent a year, and this account describes how he redirected the company. The comparison with Eastman Kodak, which held a similar position and did not survive intact, runs through the book without being laboured.
Komori describes a two-part response. The first was structural surgery: closing film manufacturing capacity, cutting the distribution network and reducing headcount by thousands, which he argues had to be done at once rather than gradually because the revenue decline was not cyclical. The second was redeploying the company's technical base. Fujifilm's film business rested on chemistry, particularly collagen, antioxidants and thin-film coating with nanoparticle control. Komori directed those capabilities into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, regenerative medicine and functional materials for flat panel displays, and made acquisitions including Toyama Chemical to build the pharmaceutical position.
The book is a chief executive's own account and reads accordingly, with limited attention to what went wrong or to the internal opposition Komori faced. It also treats the diagnosis as clearer in retrospect than it was at the time. The valuable content is the specific reasoning about which capabilities transferred to which markets, and the argument that the transferable asset was the underlying technical competence rather than the brand or the customer relationships.
Key takeaways 7
- Fujifilm's transferable asset was its chemistry and thin-film coating capability, not its brand or its photographic customer base.
- When a core market declines structurally rather than cyclically, capacity must be cut ahead of the decline rather than in response to it.
- Komori argues that a chief executive facing an existential threat must both cut and invest simultaneously, and that doing either alone fails.
- Fujifilm entered cosmetics because the antioxidant and collagen science used to prevent film degradation applied directly to skin.
- Acquisitions were used to buy regulatory and market access in pharmaceuticals, where the company had science but no route to customers.
- Kodak and Fujifilm faced the same technological shock, so the difference in outcomes came from management response rather than from circumstance.
- Diversification succeeded because each new business drew on an existing technical competence rather than on financial capacity alone.
Who should read it
Operators and investors facing structural decline in a core business who want a worked example of redeploying technical capability rather than defending a market.
Where it sits in the reference 2
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