NATIONAL ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT AND ECONOMICS

HIGHER NATIONALS
BTEC HIGHER NATIONAL DIPLOMA IN BUSINESS (RQF)

Unit Code, Number and

D/618/5042 Unit 8: Innovation and Commercialisation
Title

Semester and Academic

Semester 2, Academic year 2023-2024
Year

Unit Assessor(s) Nguyen Quang Huy/ Bui Thu Van/ Nguyen Duc Trong

Assignment Number and IC A1.1: Innovation, Commercialisation and Protection

Title (Assessment 1 of 2)

Issue Date March 20, 2024

Submission Date April 18th, 2024

IV Name Trinh Thi Thu Giang

IV Date March 20, 2024

Student name Mai Phuong Linh

NEU Student ID 10220280 Pearson ID

Plagiarism is a particular form of cheating. Plagiarism must be avoided at all costs and students who
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Please consult the relevant unit lecturer or your course tutor if you need any further advice.

Student declaration I certify that the assignment submission is entirely my own work
and I fully understand the consequences of plagiarism. I
understand that making a false declaration is a form of

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 malpractice.

Student(s) name(s) /
Mai Phuong Linh Date: 18/04/2024
Signature

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 ● No further writing at the conclusion of the examination.

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Unit Learning Outcomes:

LO1: Investigate how innovation is sourced and supported within different types of
organisations

LO2: Explore the processing of different types of innovation within organisations

Assessment Brief and Guidance:

A brief history of the digital camera

Figure 1 The first prototype digital camera, developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson

From theoretical beginnings as a space-travel navigation aid, the digital camera developed
from tapeless analogue cameras through sky-charting behemoths to consumer concepts and
beyond. To explore that long history, we've charted the milestones, the ground breakers -- and
the downright strange. Take a look to see where your camera came from, as we visit Grandad
Kodak, Uncle Apple and a whole family tree of camera cousins.

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 The beginnings

The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F. Lally of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When he wasn't coming up with ways to create artificial gravity he was thinking about how to
use a mosaic photo sensor to capture digital images. His 1961 idea was to take pictures of the
planets and stars while travelling through space, in order to help establish the astronauts'
position. Unfortunately, as with Texas Instrument employee Willis Adcock's filmless camera (US
patent 4,057,830) in 1972, the technology had yet to catch up with the concept.

The camera generally recognised as the first digital still snapper was a prototype (US patent
4,131,919) developed by Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson in 1975. He cobbled together
some Motorola parts with a Kodak movie-camera lens and some newly invented Fairchild CCD
electronic sensors.

The resulting camera, pictured above on its first trip to Europe recently, was the size of a
large toaster and weighed nearly 4kg. Black-and-white images were captured on a digital
cassette tape, and viewing them required Sasson and his colleagues to also develop a special
screen.

The resolution was a revolutionary .01 megapixels and it took 23 seconds to record the first
digital photograph. Talk about shutter lag.

Some believe that Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough,
with film remaining their bread and butter. The next step in the process would come from
elsewhere.

Figure 2 SONY’s Magnetic Video Camera

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 The end of film?

The first commercial CCD camera was developed by Fairchild in 1976. The MV-101 was
used to inspect Procter & Gamble products. The following year Konica introduced the C35-AF,
the world's first compact point-and-shoot autofocus camera. But the filmless age was
kickstarted on 25 August 1981, when Sony demonstrated the first camera to bear the name
Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera).

Not strictly a digital camera, the Mavica was actually an analogue television camera. It stored
pictures on two-inch floppy disks called Mavipaks that could hold up to fifty colour photos for
playback on a television or monitor. CCD size was 570x490 pixels on a 10x12mm chip. The light
sensitivity of the sensor was ISO 200 and the shutter speed was fixed at 1/60 second. It ran off
AA batteries.

Figure 3 CANON’s RC-250 Xapshot

The analogue age

Analogue cameras may have been the start of the digital age, in that they recorded images
on to electronic media, but they never really took off due to poor image quality and prohibitive
cost. They were mainly used by newspapers to cover events such as the 1984 Olympics, the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Gulf War in 1991. Canon launched the first
analogue camera to go on sale, the RC-701, in 1986, and followed it with the RC-250 Xapshot,
the first consumer analogue camera, in 1988.

The Xapshot was called the Ion in Europe, and the Q-PIC in Japan. It cost $499 in the US, but
consumers had to splash out a further $999 on a battery, computer interface card with
software, and floppy disks. Think about that the next time you get annoyed when you have to
pay extra for memory cards.

Figure 4 Photo of auroras taken by All-Sky camera

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 The coming of true digital

The first true digital camera that actually worked was built in 1981. The University of Calgary
Canada ASI Science Team built the Fairchild All-Sky camera to photograph auroras, an example
of which is shown on the right of our picture.

The All-Sky Camera utilised more of those 100x100-pixel Fairchild CCDs, which had been
around since 1973. What made the All-Sky Camera truly digital was that it recorded digital data
rather than analogue. In October 1981 the digital revolution rolled on with the release of the
world's first consumer compact disk player, the Sony CDP-101.

Colani's concepts: the future of cameras?

In 1983, Canon commissioned outspoken designer Luigi Colani to envision the future of camera
design. The chap who believed that "an egg represents the highest form of packaging since the
dawn of time" drew on his "no straight lines in the universe" philosophy to create the 5
Systems. These designs included (top left to right) the Hy-Pro, an SLR design with an LCD
viewfinder, a novice camera named (rather politically incorrectly) the Lady, the Super C. Bio
with power zoom and built-in flash, and the underwater Frog.

Figure 5 HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera)

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 Figure 5 shows the HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera). This was a
Gerry Anderson-esque concept for a still video camera recording to solid-state memory.
Unusually, the lens and viewfinder were on the same axis, while the flash fired through the
objective lens.

The HOMIC was exhibited at the 1984 Photokina, but was never marketed.

Figure 6 The 1990 Dycam Model 1

Digital hits the shops

The first true digital handheld camera was the Fuji DS-1P, developed in 1988 but never sold. It
recorded images as computerised files. These were saved on a 16MB SRAM internal memory
card, which was jointly developed with Toshiba. That same year, Digital Darkroom became the
first image-manipulation program for the Macintosh computer.

Also in 1988, the first JPEG and MPEG standards were set.

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 The first digital camera to actually go on sale was the 1990 Dycam Model 1 (pictured). A grey
version was marketed as the Logitech Fotoman. It used a CCD image sensor, stored pictures
digitally, and connected directly to a PC for download.

Figure 7 Hasselblad DB 4000

Digital comes to SLR

Digital backs were attached to film cameras in some SLR systems. An example of this is the
Hasselblad DB 4000 with a Leaf back (figure 7), which arrived in 1991. It packed a 2,048x2,048-
pixel CCD and 8-bit storage.

Adobe PhotoShop 1.0 hit the shops in 1990.

Figure 8 The Kodak DCS 200

Digital goes online!

Mosaic, the first web browser that let users view photographs over the Web, was released by
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992.

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 That year also saw the the Kodak DCS 200 (pictured) debut with a built-in hard drive. It was
based on the Nikon N8008s and came in five combinations of black and white or colour, with
and without hard drive. Resolution was 1.54 million pixels, roughly four times the resolution of
still-video cameras.

Figure 9 The QuickTake 200

Apple gets in on the action: the QuickTake

You'd have to live under a rock to not know that Apple makes phones these days, but did you
know it also had a crack at the digital camera market? The Apple QuickTake 100 (figure 9 top),
launched in 1994, was actually manufactured by Kodak, and was the the first colour digital
camera for under $1,000. It packed a 640x480-pixel CCD and could stash up to eight 640x480
images in the internal memory.

The QuickTake 200 (figure 9, pictured below) followed later, and was built by Fujifilm.

Figure 10 The OLYMPUS’s Deltis VC-1100 (left) and KODAK’s DC-25 (right)

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 Connected cameras and CompactFlash

The first 'photo quality' desktop inkjet printer arrived in 1994. The Epson MJ-700V2C (pictured
left) managed 720x720 dots per inch.

Later that year, the Olympus Deltis VC-1100 (figure 10, pictured left) became the world's first
digital camera with built-in transmission capabilities. With a modem connected, photos could
be transmitted over phone lines -- even mobiles -- although it took about six minutes to
transmit high-quality images. Image resolution was 768x576 pixels, the shutter speed could be
set between 1/8 and 1/1000 second, and it included a colour LCD viewfinder.

SmartMedia card and CompactFlash cards also arrived that year. The first camera to use
CompactFlash was the Kodak DC-25 (figure 10, pictured right) in 1996.

Figure 11 The CASIO’s QV-10

The shape of things to come

The shape of compact digital cameras began to emerge in Casio QV-10 in 1995, which was
the first with an LCD screen on the back. The screen measured 46mm (1.8 inches) from corner

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to corner.

It was also the first consumer digital camera with a pivoting lens. Photos were captured by a
1/5-inch 460x280-pixel CCD and stored to a semiconductor memory, which held up to 96 colour
still images. Other now-familiar features included macro positioning, automatic exposure, auto-
playback of images and a self timer. It cost $1,000.

Figure 12 The Ricoh RDC-1

In 1995, the first digital camera to shoot both still photos and movie footage with sound
appeared. The Ricoh RDC-1 included a removable 64mm (2.5-inch) colour LCD screen. The CCD
packed a 768x480-pixel resolution, while the zoom clocked in at 3x and f/2.8. More than a
decade later and those are still the baseline specs for compacts (apart from the resolution, of
course).

The RDC-1 would have set you back a hefty $1,500.

Figure 13 The CANON’s PowerShot 600

Webcams and compacts

In 1995, Logitech debuted the VideoMan, its first webcam, and the first colour digital video
camera for the personal computer.

The now-familiar compact shape continued to emerge with the Canon PowerShot 600
(pictured) in 1996. It had a 1/3-inch, 832x608-pixel CCD, built-in flash, auto white balance and
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an optical viewfinder as well as an LCD display. It was the first consumer digital camera able to
write images to a hard disk drive, and could store up to 176MB. It cost $949.

Figure 14 The PENTAX’s EI-C90

The digital age!

And there we have it. Although compacts were appearing in strange shapes, such as the
Pentax EI-C90, which split into two sections, the basic form factor was laid down for today's
multi-megapixel monsters -- roughly the same size as the tape cassette Steve Sasson used to
record one grainy image (pictured).

Camera phones and CMOS sensors appeared in 1997, while megapixel counts are constantly
climbing. The Hasselblad H3D II The Hasselblad H3D II digital SLR is a 39-megapixel behemoth
(figure 15).

In order to process that frankly ridiculous 5,412x7,212-pixel resolution, the H3D II packs a
48x36mm image sensor. To keep that leviathan of a sensor cool, Hasselblad has jammed in a
physical heatsink, which dissipates the heat generated to the entire camera body.

There's also a whopping 76mm (3-inch) screen for previewing images, and Hasselblad claims
that handling is better than on the original H3D, as the controls have been moved to within
thumb reach. The H3D II shoots raw footage -- imagine the size of those files! -- and also boasts
a GPS receiver for geotagging your pictures. This embeds location information in the image file
so that Google Earth, which the camera links directly to, or sites such as Flickr, can show where
the image was taken on a map.

Of course, 39 megapixels is pretty ludicrous, and so is the £18,500 price tag. Hasselblad has
taken this into account by offering two lesser versions of the H3D II, available to us lesser
mortals that don't need to shoot photos the size of billboards. Well, kind of: they offer 22- and
31-megapixel sensors. We may need to save up.

How far we've come.

Figure 15 The HASSELBLAD’s H3D II

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 Source:

1. Richard Trenholm (2007), Photos: The history of the digital camera,

https://www.cnet.com/news/photos-the-history-of-the-digital-camera/

2. Richard Trenholm (2007), Hasselblad H3D II: Megapixel madness,

https://www.cnet.com/news/hasselblad-h3d-ii-megapixel-madness/

------End of the scenario------

1: The history of technological change in camera industry is bound with initial radical
breakthroughs (inventions with patents) followed by incremental improvements
(innovations). Highlight the inventions and innovations that bring the new product in this
industry. Determine the difference between (1) inventions of technological breakthroughs
and (2) major innovations and (3) minor/incremental innovations.

2: Analyse the different sources of innovations related to the first prototype digital camera,
developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson:

● Describe the different functional sources of the innovations related to these products
made by Kodak, using theory of von Hippel (1988).

● Evaluate how these sources of innovation help these firms to generate new-product
innovations.

3: Using the models of demand pull and technological push to explain the interaction of
technology and business performance of the firms in making (1) SONY’s Magnetic Video
Camera, (2) CANON’s RC-250 Xapshot, (3) HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo
Camera, (4) Hasselblad DB 4000 and (5) The Kodak DCS 200. Did these innovative firms get
the ideas for innovations from the market or it were the firms’ engineers who recognizes that

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 a specific piece of new technological knowledge resulted in the firms’ new products?

4: Analyse the case of first prototype digital camera, developed by Kodak's Steven Sasson:

● Explain how Kodak’s organisational vision, leadership, culture shaped the company
innovations and commercialisations toward digital camera.

● Why Kodak missed a trick by not developing this technological breakthrough?

5: Analyze the competition among various digital cameras (product innovation) in their product-
line:

● Build the S-cure for the evolution of digital camera and film camera.

● How was the performance of digital camera improved over time?

● When film cameras were, at first, challenged by the first commercial filmless digital
camera (SONY’s MAVICA), describe the rival technology (technology of MAVICA) at time
T1 in the S-curve? How was the performance of the MAVICA by the time T1 when it, at
first, entered the market?

● HOMIC (Horizontal Memorychip Integral storobo Camera) was introduced in 1984

Photokina. Explain the 4Ps of innovation of CANON and apply the innovation funnel to
understand how it shapes innovative ideas of CANON (Colani’s concept). Why was
HOMIC was never marketed?

6: What matters for the success of LEICA digital cameras today (see
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/buying-guides/best-leica-camera )? What did LEICA do
to take the position of market leader and to maintain their advantage? Explain the 4Ps of
innovation of LEICA. Evaluate the role of frugal innovation in an organisational context of
LEICA.

Note: student could enrich evident and data for their analysis by searching on the internet,
do remember to cite the source of information.

Pass Merit Distinction

LO1 Investigate how innovation is sourced and supported within

different types of organisations

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P1 Discuss the ways in M1 Analyse the ways in which LO1 and LO2
which different innovation is sourced and supported D1 Critically analyse
organisations source and within different organisation how innovation is
foster innovation, using environments and cultures. successfully
specific examples. developed and
embedded in
LO2 Explore the processing of different types of innovation within different
organisations organisational
contexts.
P2 Differentiate between M2 Analyse how different types of
different types of innovation are successfully processed
innovation and how they within different organisation settings.
are processed within
organisations.

- THE END -

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