The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc (Studies in Economic History and Policy: USA in the Twentieth Century) - Hardcover

Graham, Margaret B. W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521322820 ISBN 13: 9780521322829

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1986

Synopsis

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. The author examines 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. Published in hardcover as RCA and the VideoDisc.

About this title

Book Description:

The introduction of the VideoDisc represented RCA's ill-fated effort to recapture innovation-based leadership after a decade of successors to David Sarnoff who attempted corporate growth through unrelated diversification and acquisition.

From Library Journal:

This is a fascinating inside history of the management of a recent R&D project and its broader meaning. After a background section, Graham describes the series of R&D decisionsshaped by the past, divisional conflict, managers, and competitiondating from 1964 through market failure of RCA's VideoDisc player in 1984. The author's style is direct and clear. Leonard Reich's The Making of American Industrial Research: science and business at GE and Bell (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1985) is a companion volume with a broader and more distant focus. RCA and the VideoDisc is a readable and stimulating work of scholarship, based on exceptional access to corporate sources. Recommended for most business history collections. John Cudd, Sch. of Library & Informational Science, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0521322820
• ISBN 13: 9780521322829
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 274