Management of Technology and Innovation in Japan

Designing the Product Architecture for High Appropriability: The Case of Canon 7
The sales of film grow exponentially in relation with the cumulative camera sales. I
understood completely. It would be hard to start a new film business, but I would like
to engage in consumables. Because of this experience we decided to sell all consumables
when we entered into a copier business.
Yamaji became the first manager of the product development department in the
new business division upon returning from the American tour and played an important
role in developing new products towards diversification. This was when he
was 34 years old. Meanwhile, what did “film burners” mean? It literally meant
that cameras burnt rolls of film. Thanks to mass production of good camera, people
would take a lot of pictures and burn a lot of films. As a film manufacturer
Canon’s success was a pleasure. As employees of a camera manufacturer, they
must have had mixed feelings about it. This experience ultimately led the company
to business machine products, the first of which were copiers.
This episode was told as an anecdote of the historical visit to Kodak. However,
the same situation actually existed in Japan. Canon employees must have known
about the attractiveness of consumables because the sales of domestic film manufacturers,
such as Fuji Film, skyrocketed when the sales of Canon cameras went
well. In fact, the business performance of domestic film manufacturers outstripped
that of camera manufacturers at some point.
For this reason, Canon engineers already apprehended that the development of
copier products was not simply making “a box,” but a new business model with a
different profit-making structure than that of cameras. In short, it was the idea of
making a machine that used consumables, and that using the consumables was an
important element of the company business.
The idea of exploring consumables and the technological breakthrough of
Canon’s image development device together brought about the development of the
unique cartridge. The former Managing Director Masashi Kiuchi was responsible
for the breakthrough of the image development device, and the former Vice President
Hiroshi Tanaka was responsible for the development of the cartridge technology.
The use of a cartridge in copiers was then duplicated in the development of
the printing head of bubble jet printers. Hiroshi Tanaka was the leader in that project
as well.
When reexamining Canon’s copiers with this historical background in mind, we
can see a striking similarity between the association of a cartridge in a copier and
that of a film in a camera. It is not only the similarity in appearance but also the
similarity in naming. The name “cartridge technology” used in copiers must have
come from the terminology used in the camera technology. The similarity of naming
in both copier’s cartridge and camera’s film cartridge is not coincidental. It is
a result of conscious efforts.
In a nutshell, during copier development, Canon was aiming for a new business
model that could bundle camera and film cartridge into one business, so to speak.
And it did succeed in realizing the model. This idea was further developed in its
printer business. We will describe this continued effort in the following section.