The Consumer Electronic Show, CES to you tech junkies, featured acres of new tech toys at its annual convention last week. One car company, Faraday Future, even displayed a concept car that would make the Batmobile jealous. Amid all these Back-to-the-Future goodies, Kodak had the audacity to feature its Super 8 movie camera as its next great product release.

Here’s an excerpt from an article from eWeek, 10 Innovative Tech Products Grabbing Attention at CES 2016.

Kodak Wants to Turn Back the Clock With Its Super 8 Camera

Kodak wants to prove that old film camera really isn’t dead. The photographic products maker shocked CES with the announcement that it’s reviving its Super 8 camera, first released in the mid-1960s, for the digital age. Early reports suggest Kodak will launch the camera later this year in limited quantities. The Super 8 shoots video on 8-millimeter photographic film. Owners then have two options: ship out the film to Kodak so it can be developed for viewing on a film projector or have it converted to digital format. Either way, it’s nice to see Kodak’s determination to keep film alive.

Kodak is being at least counterintuitive here, if not downright stubborn. Kodak’s name was synonymous with film and cameras for most of the 20^th Century and, by darn it, plans to carry that legacy into the 21^st. This move is an object lesson in finding your internal subject matter experts, and making sure you don’t lose your core competencies. You never know when film will make a big comeback, and you will have lost your first mover advantage, even if that first move is 70 years old.

Kodak as the Poster Child for Innovation #Fail

In business management and tech circles, it is often said that Kodak lost its edge in photography due to its failure to recognize two things

1. The pace and direction of technological change, in this case the potential for digital photography and the speed at which the new technology was advancing, and
2. The business it was really in, which was capturing memories, not camera, film and chemicals.

When you are looking around your organization and thinking about what knowledge needs to be preserved, think big and think outside the proverbial box. Don’t assume that you can read the tea leaves regarding either the pace of change, the direction the change will take, or the ongoing need for your goods and services despite changes in your market.

One More Case in Point, and a Plug for a Relative’s Product

Film might not only be the medium that has more staying power than the futurists give it credit. Think about vinyl records. For those of you under 40, that was the way people bought music and listened to it at home before CDs and downloads.

Vinyl records are being pressed and sold again. It’s a cottage industry, mostly, but one that is gaining a new audience. Musicians and bands are turning to “pressing vinyl” again as a cool retro move. This has even spawned a business for turntables again. Take my cousin Lance, for example. His band NO BS! Brass just released its latest funky cool jazz record on vinyl. Here’s the link and shameless plug.

Whatever business you are in, you might think that the world is changing so quickly that you will soon be looking at your customers in the rear view mirror. Not necessarily. Look at technologies that you think are passe, but in the bigger picture will always have a place with small, niche markets, rebuilders, and collectors.

Preserve your core competencies. You never know when the gramophone will make its comeback.