The story of the RCA VideoDisc is a rare inside look at a company and the way it conducts the complex process of science-based innovation. For nearly fifty years the RCA name was synonymous with innovation in the industries it helped to build - radio and television broadcasting and manufacturing, and electronics. Under David Sarnoff’s leadership the company developed an organization and a management style that gave it the ability to turn scientific discoveries into business achievement time after time. VideoDisc was RCA’s attempt to recapture that leadership after a decade in which David Sarnoff’s successors tried to follow the more fashionable paths to corporate growth of unrelated diversification and acquisition. But RCA’s ability to innovate had been undermined through disuse, and it proved unable to innovate as effectively as its Japanese competitors. Margaret Graham’s book presents an absorbing account of how RCA shaped a sophisticated consumer electronics technology in a research and development effort that spanned fifteen years. We see how the company’s history, its structure, its technical capability, and its competition all influenced the choices that were made in moving VideoDisc from laboratory to development group to market, and ultimately to withdrawal from the marketplace. Graham’s book seeks to examine the nature of science-based innovation as a management problem. It also describes the complex workings of a large corporate R&D organization and the relationship that exists between it and the other components of a major diversified corporation. Above all RCA and the VideoDisc shows that there is nothing innate about the ability to innovate technologically. It is an organizational and managerial skill that must be fostered, maintained, supported, and understood if it is to be practiced effectively. For those inside and outside corporate life who have wondered what industrial research is, why it costs so much, and why it often seems to take so long to produce commercial results, this book will be a valuable introduction to the ‘business of research’.
