Well, welcome to the Carey Marshall Thorner Scholars' Day. I'm Bill Petree, Vice Chair of Medicine for Research and one of your hosts today. I think we're still trying to make sure everyone knows of the different location today, and thank you all for finding us. I learned with interacting with patients, one of the good ways to get to know a patient is starting with, where are you from? It indicates an interest in the patient more than whatever disease that they presented with. 

I remember Jen Sasson and I were sitting in the 3 Central call room. It was a Saturday or Sunday and rounds were done and we were just tidying things up, and I said, well, Jen, where are you from? And she goes, oh, I'm from Rochester. And then I said, oh, are your parents at the University of Rochester? And they say, no, no, they both have worked for Eastman Kodak. So in total professor mode, I started lecturing Jen about how Eastman Kodak had invented the digital camera and then sort of failed to fully capitalize on it. And she interrupted me and says, oh yes, I know, that's my father. 

I'm so happy to have Steve here today, and I think that-- you'd think for a moment, what does digital camera have to do with medicine research day? I think that all of us that care for patients realize with each patient we see, there's things that we don't know, that there's evidence gaps. We don't know what the right thing is to do for a patient. And it's young people like the residents, the fellows, the students that are going to be presenting today at research day that are the ones that are going to change that. It's young people who are innovative that are going to make new discoveries to change the way that we practice medicine. And I've seen that over 30 years in my own career, seeing how medicine practices change, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in this room's contributions. 

So Steve graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1972 with a bachelor's, then got a master's in electrical engineering in 1973 and then went immediately to work. Still in Rochester at Eastman Kodak. Those dates are significant because it was two years later, he was assigned by a supervisor to say, hey, there's this new thing called a charge coupled device, or CCD, and can you make a way to capture images with this CCD? And so someone's who's like, two years out of college, age of a lot of the people in this room, set off to make a discovery that The Economist, in 2009, giving Steve its Innovator Award said, this was a seismic disruption that rendered existing technology virtually obsolete. Steve was also recognized with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Obama in 2009 for the significance of having invented a handheld digital camera. All of us now have digital cameras in our pockets. So it has been really just an amazing innovation, and Steve, thank you so much for coming to Charlottesville to spend the day with us. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Straight up here. 

OK. Thanks, Bill, for the nice, kind introduction. When Bill sent me an email asking if I might come to give a talk, I said yes right away because it was a chance for me to come to UVA and meet the people that my daughter Jennifer talked so much about over the last couple of years, and I could actually meet them. So I said yes right away, and then I realized that this was a medical school conference, and with absolutely zero education in medicine, I thought it might be problematic if I could add any value here. 

However, I did know some research area that you're talking about today, and I do know a little bit about that, and so I thought I'd share with you-- my title there-- some thoughts on innovation. I thought I'd share with you a little bit about some of my experiences during my 35 year career doing R&D in digital imaging at Eastman Kodak company and tell you a little bit of the back story about some of the products that you probably use every day right now, and how they were developed and conceived. And then at the end, I'd like to share some observations or some learnings that I gathered that innovators perhaps should keep in mind as they do their work. And this may apply in your world as well, because it has to do with how you introduce new ideas to established organizations. 

And so let me start with some learnings from the development of the first digital camera. As Bill indicated, I started work in a corporate research laboratory at Eastman Kodak Company in 1973, and in 1974 or so, my supervisor came to me and suggested that I might want to look at a new type of imaging device called a charge-coupled device and see if I could do something useful with it. And it resulted in me being able to come up with an idea about taking pictures all electronically, still pictures. 

So this resulted in a project that created a digital camera and a playback system. And this system was demonstrated throughout the year 1976 inside of the Eastman Kodak Company. And as part of any research activity, I was required to write a technical report, largely a technical description of what I had done, but after all the discussion we had around this during my presentations, I wrote this paragraph that you see up here. And I like to point out that with an audience this size, if half of us read this, it will double the number that have done so over the last 30 years, because it was completely buried and not talked about very much. 

There was no public acknowledgment of any of this work that I'm about to tell you about until the year 2001. And that occurred then because now the world was changed and digital imaging was starting to occur. I had kept the prototype camera and this picture was taken. It was the first time it was seen by the public or that any of this story was told. 

So let me tell you how this all unfolded. Boyle and Smith in Bell Labs discovered the concept of charge-coupling in 1969. This is a way to move charge packets and free electrons either on the surface or just below the surface of a piece of silicon. And if you combine that with the light gathering capabilities of a piece of silicon, you can make an imaging device. But it was about five years before an actual device became commercially available. This was the CCD Fairchild, CCD 201, the first area array. It was made up of a hundred pixels across and a hundred lines down. So 10,000 pixels, or .01 megapixels by today's way of describing these things. 

It had a really weird architecture. And this was the device that my supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, asked me to get a hold of. And so I bought one of these and it came in a little plastic box stuck in a piece of foam, and on top of it was folded a piece of paper upon which were 12 preprinted voltage designations. And next to each one, in pencil, was the actual voltage that this particular device worked at before it left the factory. And underneath it, it said, good luck, because these things would just change. If you had one voltage off by just a little bit, you got no output. It was up to you to figure it out. So it was very difficult to work with, but this was the device. 

So I took this challenge because I had done some work as a graduate student at RPI about how light affected silicon. So I was naturally interested in this. And so I started thinking about what I would try to do. This project was not a major project. This was basically me, and he said, just go and play with this thing. He didn't really tell me what to do with it. Our conversation probably lasted all about 30 seconds. And so it was a very small project and I decided to say, well, if I'm going to measure the output of this, it might be great to turn the output information into numbers rather than filtering it. That's what you would typically do for an analog signal. 

And then I said, well, if I'm going to turn it into numbers, I'm digitizing it, and then if I'm going to measure it, I might want to store it. And then pretty soon it started to come in my head that I said, I'm sort of building an equivalent of an electronic camera of some kind. And then I thought, well, I also want to be able to see the picture if I'm capturing a picture. So I would have to actually build a playback device as well. I had no idea how to do any of this, by the way, but it was just my thought. And then the last thought I had was, cameras at the time, which worked with photographic film, were mechanical marvels. I thought I'd try to build a camera with no moving parts whatsoever. That was just me being difficult. 

We had part time help. I had the help of two technicians part time. Both extraordinary individuals. Any success we had is due in large part to their energy and enthusiasm. 

We had no budget. I had no budget to go and buy anything else. I could just buy the CCD and whatever I did with it, I did with it. But luckily, Eastman Kodak Company-- I was in the apparatus division, that's where they designed and built all the equipment that used photographic materials-- was a great place to scrounge stuff, which is what I did when I was a kid in Brooklyn, so this came naturally to me. So I gathered all these parts for this thing by going around and borrowing them. 

And then last but not least, was the fact that I couldn't command any space for a laboratory. So we literally found a back room at the end of a hallway, and it was sort of a lab, but it was used as a closet. We cleaned it out and that's where we did our work. So in summary, our plan was unrealistic, no one was paying attention, I had no money, and hardly anybody knew where I was working. In other words, the situation was just about perfect. 

What happened after about a year of work was this. This is a picture of the prototype. It was built with all the parts that I stole from around the company. I could not, of course, go and command the manufacturer and design of a lens system, so I stole one out of an XL 55 movie camera. The manufacturing line for that device just happened to be under my laboratory, so I knew where the used parts were. The tape drive came from an old well logging outfit that I managed to scrounge together. The rest of the parts came from the laboratory and other areas as well. 

It's about the size of a toaster. It weighs, as indicated here, about 8 and 1/2 pounds. Ran off of batteries. We stored our image on a cassette. Exposure time was 1/20 of a second, so I captured available light photographs in 1/20 of a second, but it took 23 seconds to store that pre-stored image to the tape. So I knew I took a picture when the tape started to boot. That's how I knew I was successful at that. 

And then, also, I just want to show you here, even though this camera is seen in lots of publications now, I kept the camera. I shouldn't have. I kept the camera because it was a nice memory of a great project where I learned so much. I had no idea that it would become such an interesting device to people from a historical point of view. 

But how I remember it was this. This camera would unfold and I would work on it inside this set up here. And so when I would make changes to it, or when it broke, which it periodically always did, I would make the changes. There was no prototyping and then putting it into the camera. The camera literally was the prototype testbed for this. So this is kind of how I remember it, and I would fold it up and then I would go and do my demonstrations. So this camera still exists. It's still owned by the Eastman Kodak Company. It was on display at the Smithsonian for several years. It's now been moved back to Rochester and is in a museum there in Rochester. And there have been many photographs taken of this, but my favorite, I have to share with you, was one day after this became public, I brought the camera home and a young doctor in waiting posed for the picture. I've never shown this before, but you dads understand, I just had to do it. So there it is. And that's probably my favorite picture of the camera. 

The playback system was another challenge not talked about much, but I had to take this stored image and then reconstitute it and make it available to the only electronic display I had, which was a television set. So in order to do that, I had to have more computing power. Microprocessors were just coming out, so a technician who worked with me, Jim Shipp, and I wrote a research lab proposal to study microprocessors. And in order to do that, we had to have a microprocessor development system. 

So we made up this big excuse and they said, oh, that sounds like a good idea, because we were in electronics research at the company. So they allowed us to buy this. And of course, it just appeared in our lab and became the basis for the playback unit. We never mention that in our justification. And you can see that the tapes are on the left side. That's my photo album, there. I would plug the tape in there, the information would be downloaded, it would be put together, and made into an image in there, and then we made it into a television signal. We interpreted up to 400 lines because that's typically what you need for a television screen, and then it would be displayed on the TV screen. 

This was all hand coded in assembly language. Anybody's ever done that knows the pain that I went through for that one. And here's the test image. This is the only image I have that shows how the image worked or what it looked like. At Kodak, whenever you do anything, even something as odd as this, you have to use a standard test target for the evaluation of image quality. So the image scientists had used the standard boy dog test image for black and white imaging systems. I put that on a piece of plexiglass, back lit it, and then I took a picture of it with my prototype, and then went through the whole process I just described with the playback unit, put it on a television set, moved it together, and then, because I was not allowed to take pictures inside of Kodak-- that was a rule-- I had to hire a Kodak photographer to come up and to take this image. 

And so this shows you what it's like. It wasn't great imaging. I could point out all the flaws in this image. You can see them, perhaps. There's dropouts, there's contouring, and there's lack of resolution, but it was good enough to demonstrate the concept of taking still images all electronically. And so this is what people were seeing when I demonstrated the camera throughout the year 1976. 

Now let me jump ahead a few years, because after this presentation was done, there was a lot of discussion. There was a patent filed. A patent was granted in 1978, the first patent on a digital camera, and really very little discussion took place about it inside the company. But research started and we did a lot of research in there. So now I want to talk about a product that you never heard of, but was absolutely pivotal in the development of digital photography and the development of the first, what you call now, a DSLR. 

One of the big challenges, when you're going after something like this, there's kind of a change. You have to parse out all the technical challenges. And one of them was we knew images had to get much better than just 10,000 pixels. We knew it had to be in the millions of pixels. Kodak started developing CCDs, actually very quietly, not really talking about it much, making them bigger than anybody else in the world. They had developed the Bayer array, which Bryce Bayer, a mathematician, had come up with in 1975, which is a mosaic of red, green, and blue little filters over the pixels. You have Bayer arrays on all of your digital cameras right now. 

But then, the challenge was, how do we reduce the amount of information such that we can store these images in a reasonable size in a reasonable speed? Image compression. This was a big challenge. And so I wanted to try to see if I could figure out what image compression would be required, and how could we get it out of the laboratory, where all these other algorithms were being tested, into a real product? 

And so we came up with this thing. It was an image transmission system, something about the size of an old VCR, and what we were going to try to do is come up with a system where we would capture an image, as the diagram in the bottom shows you, we would go through image compression, and we would send it out over a telephone line-- 9,600 bits per second was the fastest modem we had at the time-- and then use an identical unit to reconstruct the image. You would not be able to tell the difference between the image you sent and the image you received. And when I say you can't tell the difference, I'm talking from an Eastman Kodak image quality point of view, which is a very high standard. 

So I went to one of the world's experts in image compression, Dr. Majid Rabbani. He worked at Kodak. And I asked him, I said, which one of the algorithms that are under discussion around the world today should we attempt to do this with? And he said, well, it's easy. He says, discrete cosine transform, which is a transformed way of doing coding. And when I looked at it, it was computationally very intense. And I went back to him and I said, do you have anything else? Because this is really hard. And he said, well, that's your problem. The world will decide that DCT is the way to do image compression. There were about two dozen algorithms actually under active discussion. He was absolutely right. DCT is the basis of what you call JPEG now. That standard was decided in 1992, I believe, and this discussion took place in 1986. So he was right. 

So we did a lot of work, and one of the things you have to realize when you're in an area like this, Kodak was not an electronics company. And most people were saying, well, the electronic companies are going to own this. They're going to be able to get there first. But realize that Kodak didn't know much about electronics, but they knew the problem, that is photography. And so we knew when we did discrete cosine transform which bits to throw away so that you wouldn't notice it. So it was a human visual response they had done work on. 

And so we successfully marketed this thing. We put this product out there. Quite frankly, I didn't really care who bought this thing. I thought maybe we'd sell maybe a hundred of these. I just wanted to see if we could actually do it and get it out of the laboratory. And it was a lot of work to get this to work. I had to go down to Texas Instruments and find the actual guy who did a graphics chip and had him hand code this stuff to run fast enough. It was it was a big project. 

What happened next was totally unexpected. CBS News had bought one of these, and Tiananmen Square happened. And the Chinese shut off all outside communication. They didn't know this device existed, in fact, nobody hardly knew it existed. CBS News then was the only news organization to actually get real time pictures out from all the activity that was going on there. So they were so excited about this, they were scooping everybody. They wanted to do a story about the product. Now you would think that as a company, if you introduced a new product and a national news organization wanted to do a special story about your product, that you'd jump at that chance. Well, the management of Kodak said, no way, we don't want anybody knowing. In fact, our management really didn't even know we had marketed this thing. We were part of a very small division called electronic photography division, and this sort of slipped out because they didn't know what it was and nobody was buying it anyway. It was more of a technical experiment. 

So they said no, and we had our leader on this division, Dr. Brad Paxson, who really is a very persuasive person, said, well, tell you what. We won't mention the name of the product or Kodak at all, but can they do the story anyway? And they said, oh, OK, as long as you don't mentioned Kodak, because I don't want the photographers getting mad at us because we basically took away all the film photographers' ability to get pictures out. 

So I'm going to show you this video and you're going to see a couple of things. One is you're going to see the sneaky way we got our name up there. It's on the splash screen. And you'll also see they came up with another name for this thing. And you'll also see the picture coming up in an odd way, and that was the way we were doing the discrete cosine transform. So it was a very advanced way to do it. 

This was the first time that any of the research that I know of that Kodak was doing into digital photography actually saw the light of day. So let me show you that. Hopefully it'll play. 

On the streets of Beijing. Now the sights we have seen so far have been gripping, and it has taken a marvel of technology to get them out of the country. We have that story from Channel 2's Jane Velez-Mitchell. 

[INAUDIBLE] 

They've roughed up reporters, but the Chinese government still hasn't been able to stop it, the flow of compelling images. Massacres, monumental courage, pictures that have galvanized world opinion. The horror stories have kept seeping out. Even after Chinese officials confronted CBS News anchorman, Dan Rather, and made him shut down a satellite that was used to feed videotape of the historic democracy movement. After a Chinese official shut down a satellite, they may have thought they had stopped the flow of video tape from China to the rest of the world. Normally, that would be true. Normally, you would have to have physically transported the videotape to another feed point in Tokyo or Hong Kong and set it from there. But in this case, thanks to new technology that CBS used the very first time during this crisis, the network was still able to get dramatic pictures directly out from China to New York, and then to the rest of the world. 

It's called a transceiver, or pixilator. Folks here at CBS Network call it a magic box, a machine that takes moving pictures, captures a single frame, then breaks that frame down into computer information-- 

[LAUGHTER] 

--to an ordinary phone line, sends it to a similar magic box in New York. It takes the information and turns in fact into a single picture. Reporters in Beijing then use a cellular phone to speak live on television from Tiananmen Square over the pictures. 

Can you hear that gunfire? OK. We're going to get out of here. 

Commandeering crisis coverage for CBS, Lane Vernardos, Director of Special Events for CBS News. He says that single piece of equipment, the magic box, has changed the face of its news coverage. 

This is a godsend. We could have done what we've done over the last, say, 36, 48, 72 hours, without this kind of device. 

To the Chinese, it's been a lifeline of the world. 

We've taken some still photographs of crowds cheering on our TV crews. They're so happy to see us, even though it's forbidden now officially. People are saying-- they were saying to our crews, get our story out. 

While the Chinese could confiscate the magic box in Beijing, fans of the new technology feel no regime can stop the flow of technological advance, and predict the future will make it increasingly difficult to violate human rights in an ever shrinking global village. Jane Velez-Mitchell, Channel 2 News. 

Well, you can chalk that up to you just never know. And so, it was it was out now, and now our division was receiving a little bit more attention from our marketing people as to what we were doing. But the reason I showed you this-- by the way, this product received an Emmy for that, and it was it was a really nice recognition for something that was truly just an experiment. We were really pushing the edges of technology to see what we could do, and we never thought it would find that kind of a use. 

But why did I tell you this? Well, let's take a look at the architecture of this. They had a framestore that is something that would digitize an image and store it in digital memory. Then, you would do this magic compression step where we would reduce down, basically remove about 80% of the captured bits and still contain the complete integrity of the image, and then send it over a modem. And then what you would do is you attach a video camera, a still video floppy camera, to the front of it, capture and image, and that's how it would work. 

So if we could do this, then you replace it with a CCD imager that's being made by our research laboratories. We were up at about 1.5 megapixels at that time with Bayer arrays. You replace that modem with memory cards, which were now being built by several of the Japanese manufacturers for a totally different purpose. You take some batteries, you shrink it all down, you get the optics and put it in front. What do you have? That's what we wanted. So this was really going to be a 2-step development. 

Once I started working on this, this time I had the good sense to go talk to a real camera designer, and I went to a fellow named Robert Hills. He was a very experienced senior camera designer. He designed everything from cameras that took pictures of satellites on the moon all the way to consumer photography. I went to him and I said, Bob, I'd like to build a camera, a digital camera like this. And he said, well, he didn't like digital photography, of course, but he knew it was coming. So he said to me, he says, well, Sasson, he said, I'll help you with this, he said, but I'm not going to build some crazy camera like you built. Those things are the weirdest things I've ever seen. It's going to be a real camera. It's going to look like a camera, it's going to act like a camera, or we're not going to build it. 

And so what I'm going to show you now is another camera you've never seen. These were hand built. They were operational in 1989. The specifications are shown here on the left side. We used the Kodak CCD imager that people didn't really know we were building. We put all of these features in it. It worked on memory card, it did buffering so I could take rapid pictures and the compression would catch up with it, much like a DSLR would do. We built about half a dozen of these by hand, but we made them look real, because the first persons we were going to go see were the marketing department. Professional photography, which were the people we got mad at us for the other thing, so we probably didn't do much homework on this. 

But we went to them and we said, could you sell one of these? They were operational. They worked, they took nice pictures. And the answer was, yeah, we can, but we won't, not if it comes at the expense of one film camera. So in my mind, this became sort of a watershed moment, because technically, we were having very robust discussions inside the company whether this technology would ever get to the point of being available to a consumer. But in 1989, I think we kind of proved it. The team that built this was probably less than 10 people. What could Sony or Canon do? We were ahead of them, we knew that, but we knew also that they would quickly catch up. 

So this camera was abandoned. There is still one of these actually that exists. It's on display in the USPTO, in their patent museum. The only one that's left is on display there. Bob was quite disgusted at this, and so was I, but I talked him into filing an invention disclosure, and what happened was a patent was issued on the architecture of this camera, and it turned out that this fundamentally defined how DSLRs work. It was called the 107 patent. 

And later on, in the early 2000s, the patent wars started on this. Typically, Kodak was very benign when it came to intellectual property. The photographic industry, in general, was a very gentle industry. Nobody sued anybody else. There was only a few players anyway. But when the Japanese manufacturers started coming in, they started coming in our front door and saying, hey, you owe us money, because we were now starting to do digital cameras. And then our intellectual property people said, well, wait a second, we invented everything here. 

So it turned out that there is a lot of intellectual property suits started. And the comment I just show here is one of the impressions that some of the industry insiders, when they looked at the 107 patent, thought it was a pretty good patent. So what happens was this, plus three other key patents that were developed by other researchers, became the basis for a whole intellectual property battle that took place in the early 2000s to mid 2000s. Show them up here. All of these patents were figured. None of them were knocked out. The 107 patent died its natural death after 17 years, and Kodak ended up making a lot more money off of intellectual property than they ever did selling any digital cameras. The intellectual property-- I don't know the exact number, I know it's in the billions, though, off of that. 

So it sort of shows you even though we were trying to do it with product, it turned out that the intellectual property trail turned out to be the most lucrative, at least the Kodak. Every single digital camera manufacturer in the world today, every single cell phone manufacturer in the world today, has licensed the fundamental technology behind cameras from Kodak. 

And let me show you one more product here, the thermal printing kiosk. I went off to do printing because I said, well, if they're not interested in this, maybe they're interested in printing. And so this was the other side of it. How do you make digital prints? And this was based on thermal dye sublimation technology. That's a technology where you put a coating of dye on a thin membrane and you run it under a thermal print head, which is a linear array of heaters at about 300 dots per inch, and you move it past there and you create a cyan record, a magenta record, and a yellow record and you do full color images and it's photographic quality. 

And so I was tasked with being the lead engineer on this entire project. This took almost three years. I'm just beginning to recover now from this, but it was a major development and turned out to be the basis of a major industry that still exists today, and that is the kiosk business. It was first suggested by some people in another division that we a photographic kiosk-- that is, a photographic copy, that had never existed before-- where someone could come in with a print, put it down on a scanner, and actually make another print and it would be just as good. And this was, again, a really cool idea, and I thought Kodak would really go after this, because we were selling media, which is what we were used to. And the margins were quite high, we had about 70% margin on this media. We were the only people that could make it. Good business, right? 

They didn't like this either, and the reason they didn't like it was because it upset the present customers. So think about a wedding photographer who likes to sell prints. Somebody buys just a set of prints, and then they can make copies for all their friends. And so we have to do all kinds of gyrations to get to the US region and the European region to adopt this. It was actually the Australian region that started doing this, and they sort of making money hand over fist, and that was the only way that they convinced the rest of the regions to do that. So my point here is, even though a new technology might be even closer to what you traditionally do in your business, even a relatively slight change can meet with a surprising amount of resistance. 

So let me let me move on here now, if I can, and talk a little in general about innovation and what does it feel like. I'm from Kodak, so I have to use pictures. And that kind of fits how it is. You're constantly running against all kinds of obstacles, but you keep moving. There's a lot of books on innovation. I'm sharing with you today some of my personal observations that I've observed as key things that innovators should think about as they are introducing their new ideas. Read the books, but this is sort of my impression of things that I wish I had known when I started off. I learned the hard way. 

First, let me start talking about culture, corporate culture. This is something you don't actively consider, but it is crucial. It is very, very important. You have to overtly think about the culture that you're introducing this new idea to. It's important because people make all of their judgments based on the cultural norm. I suggest that whenever you possibly can, describe your idea in culturally familiar terms. I'll give you an example. In the first digital camera, I could have recorded on that tape a bit density of well over two kilobits per inch, which means I could have stored over 150 images on a tape. And I thought, well, that was terrific. I'm not going to be limited on the number of pictures I have to take. 

You know what? It made the product seem even more distant and it was an unnecessary detail in terms of the overall concept of photography without film. And so I decided to always describe the concept as having 30 images on a tape. Halfway between 24 and 36, the two consumer film lengths at the time. It made it seem more normal, and yet the fundamental concept was still being discussed. So I suggest that you keep the concept relatively simple if you can, just down to its basics. Try to make it culturally similar, and that we'll get more people thinking actively about it than if you didn't do that. My takeaway here is don't challenge the culture, use it wherever possible. 

Second thing is friends. And this is something that I noticed, private support-- and that means the support you get when you're talking with your buddy in the hallway or the lunch table or at the bar after work-- is going to be a lot higher than the public support you'll get. And the reason for that is that fundamentally, research and innovation is about creating questions, good questions about what could be. And if you realize that most of our training is about coming up with answers, it makes it uncomfortable for anybody to say, hey, I don't know, about what's going on. And it's even more uncomfortable for your friends. 

I'll give you another example. When I was giving the presentation of the first digital camera, what would happen is these managers would all show up in the conference room and I would fold up my little camera and walk down the hallway. And one time I was walking down there and I saw a friend of mine, the head of the electrophysics division, he was looking in the actual room where the managers would gather. I looked at him and he sort of smiled, and he saw me coming down the hallway and he came up to me and he said, is that meeting yours? And I said, yeah, I'm going to go show the camera. He looked at me and he says, I'm glad I'm not you, and then he walked away. He was a good friend, but he knew what I was walking into was a lot of challenges. So you have to expect this kind of thing. So my takeaway here is, "I don't know" it's uncomfortable for everybody, especially friends. You expect that. 

Public relations. Here's something that we have no training in, but the fact is that if you're going to have a change, you've got to communicate it, and it's your job to do that. The average person doesn't have much training in this. You'll have to basically look at your audience and focus on what they're interested in, what they're sensitive to. 

Good example of what not to do. When I had to set up these meetings-- there was probably more than a dozen meetings of managers throughout 1976 that I showed and demonstrated the camera to, and I had to send out the meeting notice. You know what I entitled the meeting notice? Filmless photography. Bad choice given the audience. You have to think a little bit about where you're starting from. So you have to be open to that. Clearly, you're going to be pointed out all the shortcomings of your new idea. Be open to that. Don't get defensive. 

And then one of the things I noticed, and especially in the light of where I was coming from, where I was challenging the viability of a technology that was over 100 years old and was quite successful over that time, don't spend any time discounting the present approach that you might be displacing. Just don't do it. Because what happens is, people love what they have, and if you start discounting it in any way, they start forgetting about the idea and they start looking at your motives. It's kind of a subtle thing but I saw it. So you don't want to get there in that part of the discussion. So try to keep the motives out of it, and the best way to do that is the shortcomings of the present technology will become self evident. You just don't spend any time doing it. Let them do it. So the takeaway here is ideas should be challenged, not motives. Stay away from that if you can. 

Roadblocks. Every organization has a built in no factory. They will say no the first time you propose just about anything. I can't tell you the number of times or a number of reasons I heard over the intervening years when we were working in those areas, probably from the mid 70s to the early 90s, why that digital camera that's in your pocket or purse right now would never exist. And those predictions and those roadblocks were suggested by experts in the field, and they were right at that moment. 

So what I suggest is-- and by the way, it doesn't necessarily have to be just technical, it could be organizational roadblocks as well. That printer that I talked about and I developed, we followed a very disciplined commercialization process at Kodak. You go from a gate zero when you introduce the concept to gate six where the product is ready to ship to the customer. And at those gates, there were milestones where management would get together and decide whether they want to spend the money to go the next step. Gate two was will you froze the specifications. 

After gate two, nobody could change specifications. Well, we had just passed gate four, that's what we were releasing our product for our pre-production tooling, our EMs were being tested, so we were well down the road. We couldn't change any design aspect of this. Somebody came into my office and said, you know, they just changed the specifications. I said, you can't do that. He says, well, they did. And I said, well, what'd they change? And he said, well, they said when the print comes off, you have to be able to pour hot coffee on the print and nothing happened to it. 

So I have no idea where that specification came from. I don't know who suggested it, although I would have liked to have met that person at that moment. But I really didn't-- I couldn't even respond to this, because I had to keep a schedule. I had a mega million dollar program going on. There were literally hundreds of people working on this in the media side, the electronics, the mechanics, and so I said, I can't really do anything about this. But luckily, I'm in Eastman Kodak Company and it's one things is we have some of the greatest chemists in the world, certainly has to do with coding. And in a matter of weeks, these fellows came up with a way to put a clear coat on this ribbon. So you'd have now four patches, cyan, magenta, yellow, and a clear coat. And this clear coat, using just the head we had already, just reprogramming the temperature profile. We could peel off that clear coat and it would stick to the surface. So if you ever see a thermal dye sublimation printer, if you go to CVS or something, you'll see four patches going on. That's why. And this clear coat goes on and you can pour coffee on it and nothing happens. 

Turned out to be actually a pretty good deal, because it kept us at a competitive advantage to the Japanese for several years. But it was done in a very haphazard way, in my opinion. But the point is, you'll see roadblocks. My takeaway is remember you don't have to invent everything. Stick with what you can do and keep working on it. The whole world's inventing along with you. You'd be surprised at where some of these new ideas or solutions to problems that are facing you come from. And they may not even come from anywhere close to the field that you're working in. 

Let's talk about what I call the Personal P's. The first thing anybody sees about your new idea is you. That's really important to realize. It's how you behave, it's how you react, it's how you interface that is going to determine whether that initial acceptance is going to be there or not. Let me talk about what the three-- I call them patience, persuasion, and persistence. 

With patience, what I think here is take a breath. You've had a tremendous amount of time to get comfortable with your idea, whatever it is. You've thought about it a lot, you've planned about a lot, and your audience simply has not gotten that. You will get an initial rejection. Expect it. The first thing you're going to hear is no, because people are not comfortable with a new idea. In the case of the digital camera, there was technical pushback, image quality, reliability, and all the rest. But we also got pushback, really violent pushback, about the photo finishing chain, because what I was proposing didn't really require one. The photo finishing chain was all of those photo finishes around the world that were selling film and supplying services. 

They kept asking me, what's going to happen to them? And I really didn't know. Think about it. When George Eastman came up with this whole business model, it was actually brilliant because every photographic experience required three interfaces, three touch points with the customer. First when you bought the film, the second when you brought it back to develop, and the third when you went back to pick up your prints. Retailers love that. Well what about that? I don't know. I don't think they need them. They can sell batteries. That wasn't a very successful answer. 

So my takeaway here is, get comfortable with it. Get patient with the resistance. If you get people challenging you, they're listening to you. The worst thing is if they're not challenging you, then they're not listening. Be aware of that. 

Second one is persuasion, and this one is something we don't practice. You don't learn it in school. It's something that I think you have to think a little bit about. Technical people aren't good at this, and that, I think, is true. In the early stages of an idea, you don't have enough data to convince anybody, and so you have to start to now get people interested in your idea, curious about your idea. You know what I spent a lot of time doing when I was demonstrating this camera? I would go into the room and I would take this camera and I would walk up to the first person and take a picture, head and shoulders shot of them. And then while the tape was recording, I would describe what this thing was, and when the tape was done, I would take a picture of this person on the other side of the room. Then I would put the camera in the room, put the camera on the table, pop out the tape, put it into the playback unit, and 30 seconds later, up would pop their picture. Nobody had seen anything quite like that before, and I promptly lost control of the meetings every time after that, because there would just be lots of questions. 

Well, I couldn't answer a lot of the questions. So do you know what I ended up doing? I started using analogies. And back then, I had two things going against me. One was, obviously, didn't require film or paper. So that was like a bad thing. But also, it was digital and I was proposing this to be a consumer product. Well, there were no digital consumer products, so not only was the concept not a good thing, the technology I was using to describe it was not a good thing either. Digital had a very bad reputation, unlike today, everything's digital. Back then, digital had a bad reputation. It was complicated, it was expensive, it was unreliable, whatever. There were no digital products for consumers. 

So what I did was I started reaching. Calculators were just coming out. This is a pretty young audience, so I don't know if I should ask this, but does anybody remember the HP 35 calculator? Oh, thank you. Thank you, really, for coming. I feel so old. Anyway, that was the first calculator that was being made available, and engineers were buying it. Engineers are considered consumers, at least some of the time. And so I said, well, think of this as a calculator with a lens. So I was using an analogy that was probably improper, but it got people thinking, oh, maybe. Nice calculators, I could see that. Then on the playback unit, I was very lucky. This was 1976, this was the year that Jobs and Wozniak were just coming up with their Apple board, the first computer that was just a board. Wozniak had used the same D rams I had used, so it was a technical connection, but I found it that way. And I said, well, maybe this board could be used as a playback unit, even though I knew that technically, it would have to be a lot more powerful than what they were proposing at the time. But I thought, well, there's an idea of something. 

So there's another example of something really out there that, if you use your imagination, you could extend it. I would get challenged on that. I remember once being asked by one of the marketing people from professional-- no, it was actually consumer. I remember him because I remember I had no answer to that. He said, well, Sasson, he says, how much for that calculator? And I said, well, it's about $400. And how much for that board from the California guys? I said, about $700. He said, so for $1,100, you can take way worse pictures than a fully loaded Instamatic for $35. Why are we talking about this? Well, I didn't have an answer. All I was suggesting is that there may be a pathway, that the world is starting to head in that direction. 

So it creates some difficult conversations, but it gets people starting to think that way, when you start using these analogies. So my takeaway here is, try to get them curious about your idea. Have them start to think, their imagination about how this idea. It requires you to lead other people to get to your point, to get to your idea, to get to your vision. I want to just take an aside here, because I've done this with Jennifer as well. 

Leadership. There's tons of books on leadership, and I want to tell you that if you're an inventor, if you're an innovator, you are in the leadership business. And so it requires you to motivate people to go in a direction that ordinarily wouldn't go, any group of people toward a common goal. I found in the middle of my career, I got exposed through some mentors this whole business about leadership and what are the traits of that. And there's a very good book I want to suggest, "The Leadership Challenge," by Kouzes and Posner. These guys have been writing about leadership since the mid 1980s, and what they have identified is that good leadership is independent of culture, of discipline, of occupation, of industry. 

There are five examples, there are five practices, practiced by all good leaders, and these are the things that allow them to motivate people to move in a direction that wouldn't ordinarily go. Leadership is not the job of the guy in the corner office. It doesn't come with corporate rank. Leadership is everybody's business, and if you learn this stuff, you're going to start to notice it. So I suggest you get this book, read it, and then you're going to start to notice why certain people you want to listen to, why certain people are more effective at getting things done. It's universal. They've got like, six editions of this book. The sixth is out now and they keep refining what they're learning, but it's the same principles over and over again. So I offer that as something I wish I had learned earlier. And by the way, it's going to spoil movies for you, too, because you'll see all the heroes in the movies are doing exactly this. 

The last one is persistence, and this might be obvious, but let me characterize what I call persistence in a way what I call intelligent dedication to ideas when you're being challenged in resistance. You don't feel intelligent when people are peppering you with questions and you don't have answers. Give thoughtful consideration to all of these ideas, all these challenges, because these challenges are really going to change your concept. Your concept is going to evolve. It will not be exactly as you think it is. You're motivated to think it is, but it isn't. It's going to change over time. 

When I talked about digital photography in the beginning in 1976, there was a real challenge about, why would anybody want to look at their pictures on a television set? That was that was thrown at me all the time. Why would anybody want to do that? Prints had been with us for over 100 years. They're cheap, they're reliable, universally viewable. You can send then in the mail. Why would anybody even want to go there? And so, I didn't have a good answer for that, however, there was a good answer for it. That is, the whole world's going to change. I didn't think about Wi-Fi or at home printing. I didn't think about social networks. I didn't think about-- all I thought about was point to point, extending from one telephone to another. I didn't think about any of the things that we take for granted today. 

So these things. The world's intending along with you, they're going to shape your idea, and the first time you'll get an inkling as to what that is will be the challenges that you'll be offered here, and you'll have to be persistent to go after it. So my suggestion here, the takeaway is, don't let them dilute your enthusiasm. Use those challenges to fuel you to think in a different way, and that'll allow you to expand your vision, expand your view of what your idea is, and inevitably, it will show up looking like that in the future at some point. 

So I'm at 1:00. I'm going to end my talk now. I do want to thank you very much for taking the time to come and listen. It's been my pleasure to address you in this and talk a little bit about innovation. Thank you. 

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