Pedagogy may appear static at times, but a systemic shift in the way students are taught is imminent. It’s not productive to call education a stodgy old man. And the innovator has innovated with a purpose. With little direct competition to force risky decisions, these disruptive innovators make calculated improvements on their product based on market demands, until at some point it intersects with the quality of the incumbent’s product. The rookie technology is brushed off as too cheap, inefficient, or unprofitable, compared to the proven, high-end, legacy issue. They captured a market whose need and budget was left unaddressed by the legacy device – from this foothold, Sony began dominating the portable electronics market, wiping away vacuum-tube companies along with RCA.ĭisruptive innovations, according to Clayton Christensen, author of “Innovator’s Dilemma,” often hit the market appearing inferior to the legacy product, keeping incumbents initially ignorant. Eventually, recognizing the value in portability, Sony made a logical expansion on the technology by releasing the first portable transistor television. Sony’s new device caught on quickly with teenagers who couldn’t afford table-top radios and didn’t mind the crackling sound of their pocket radio as long as they could take it with them to the beach. What was important, however, was the discovery of a brand new market. The tiny radio produced a horribly static sound and batteries were quick to die. In 1955, the company took the technology in a lateral direction, releasing the first battery-powered, pocket transistor radio. Sony saw an opportunity for something different. RCA quickly labelled this as a technical limitation of a fledgling technology, one which money could overcome, spending over $1 billion in research and development to find applications for the transistor in the market that currently existed. This transistor, however, could not handle the power of larger popular electronic devices, such as tabletop radios, box televisions and early digital computers. Most technologies tell a story of tangled interests, accidental discoveries, and circuitous implementation.ĭo you know the story about Sony’s disruption of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)? In 1947, Bell Labs invented the transistor, a potential replacement for vacuum tubes, which enabled the operation of smaller, less power-hungry devices. The history of innovation is rarely linear. These troubles passed quickly and two years later, Sony came up with the 13,800 yen "pocketable" TR-63 radio, which had a speaker and became a huge best-seller.Skip Article Header. However, it turned out that although the catalog said users could assemble the unit in four hours, customer service personnel were kept extremely busy with inquiries from customers who, at the time, were not used to electrical circuitry. At 5,700 yen, the TR-2K was cheaper than the 19,900 yen TR-55 because, in addition to enabling customers who bought the product to assemble it themselves using only an soldering iron, amplification for the speaker was unnecessary and it was possible to use cheaper transistors. Adopting what might in one sense be called an aggressive approach, Sony engineers achieved greater reductions in scale via a bold strategy that eliminated the speakers to create an earphone-only radio. The speaker, condensers, transducers and other parts also had to be reduced in size. To create smaller radios, it was not enough to make only the transistors smaller. Initially, however, it proved impossible to make Japan's - and Sony's - first transistor radio, the TR-55, pocket-sized. Transistor radios promised massive size reductions, and realizing units that would fit in the pocket was the dream of every technician involved in the commercialization process. The TR-2K was Japan's first transistor radio kit and, when assembled, represented Japan's second pocketable ultra-compact transistor radio. Less than a month later, Sony kicked off sales of the little-known TR-2K transistor radio kit as well. Sony launched the first Japanese transistor radio, the TR-55, in September 1955.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |