Akio Morita Inventor of the personal stereo (1979)

Today Sony announced that it would cease Japan-based production of one of the 20th Century’s most defining consumer appliances, the Walkman. While that may not be the last we hear of the Walkman it certainly marks the end of an era - that ended long ago. But the history of the Walkman’s amazing success and it’s even more amazing father, Sony co-founder Akio Morita, is worth remembering - for the lessons it teaches every innovator about the climb up and down the innovation summit. Here’s an excerpt about Sony and Akio from my latest book The Innovation Zone.

Morita’s personal chemistry of defiance and fearlessness in the absence of hard proof, in fact in the face of utter disbelief and ridicule by colleagues and competitors, is the raw material of innovation in its most basic form. Sony’s innovations were the foundation of not only an industry, but a movement that ultimately lead the way to globalization, innovation, and consumerism on a scale more massive than could ever have been conceived of by anyone before the Second World War.

In 1946, with his father’s $25,000 investment, Morita and Masaru Ibuka, a university colleague, partnered to form Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. Also known as TTK).

In what has to be one of the most brilliant product rollout campaigns of the 20th century consumer electronics industry, Akio allowed the market to shape itself. Over four years, TTK transformed itself into Sony and went through four generations of technology until it finally hit the market epicenter with its TR-63 in 1957. In the next two years, Sony created no less than eight additional generations of the pocket transistor radio, each one the embodiment of numerous lessons learned. By then, it had sold more than 1,000,000 pocket transistor radios. The breakthrough pace of Sony’s ability to innovate was unprecedented at the time, and it quickly became the hallmark of its agile brand.
Because of Morita’s ability to fail fast and abandon his ideas in favor of the market’s ideas, nothing Sony developed ever got stuck as an invention. Instead, Sony flooded the market with one innovation after another. It was an endless deluge of innovations, each slightly better than the last, each slightly less expensive, and each slightly more in tune with the buyer – call it relentless re-invention through failure.
One reason we get too wrapped up in the product side of innovation is that we see the end result (in Sony’s case the Walkman), and focus on the object as the innovation. In fact, the object is only the end result of an amazingly integrated and spontaneous organization. Sony was able to innovate not only because of Morita’s ethos, but more so because of the processes it had put into place to allow ideas to flourish in a climate of creation. The risk for Sony ultimately was not the risk of new ideas, but instead the risk of not having new ideas. Innovation is a very unforgiving, constantly accelerating treadmill. Once you jump on, you have little choice but to move faster with each step with no graceful way to get off.