Capabilities, Cognition and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging

There is empirical evidence that established firms often have difficulty adapting to radical technological change. Although prior work in the evolutionary tradition emphasizes the inertial forces associated with the local nature of learning processes, little theoretical attention has been devoted in this tradition to understanding how managerial cognition affects the adaptive intelligence of organizations. Through an in-depth case study of the response of the Polaroid Corporation to the ongoing shift from analog to digital imaging, we expand upon this work by examining the relationship between managers’ understanding of the world and the accumulation of organizational capabilities. The Polaroid story clearly illustrates the importance of managerial cognitive representations in directing search processes in a new learning environment, the evolutionary trajectory of organizational capabilities, and ultimately processes of organizational adaptation.