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Sunday, September 21, 2008

In BusinessWeek: "Innovation Lessons from Hollywood"


BusinessWeek Online ran a piece this week related to Inventing the Movies, titled "Innovation Lessons from Hollywood."

From the piece:

    Ever since Thomas Edison and Kodak founder George Eastman helped invent the movie industry in the 19th century, the people who populate it have tended to give the cold shoulder to every new tool, technology, or business model that comes along. From sound to color, television to home video, computer animation to the Internet, each new idea has been dubbed too expensive, too unreliable, just a fad, or a threat to existing business models.

    And yet if Hollywood hadn't eventually embraced each of these innovations, it's unlikely that the business would have survived.

    Hollywood, it turns out, isn't so different from every other successful, established industry—from health care to financial services to auto manufacturing. Amazing amounts of energy are spent fighting ideas with the potential to expand the business and enable it to survive.


Along with it was a list of "18 People Who Changed Hollywood."

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1 Comments:

  • An unsurprisingly US-centric list, I know it says "...that changed Hollywood" but I think it's just as likely that Stefan Kudelski (inventor of the Nagra) had as profound, if subtler, an effect on Hollywood as Mike Todd or William Castle, and Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut (standing in for the whole French Nouvelle Vague) a more pervasive, if less elephantine, influence than James Cameron, Godard was after all intimately involved in the development of the Aaton camera. Let's get Rune Ericson, Swedish inventor of the Super16 format in there while we're at it. Also, while I'm sure Lance Weiler was right out the on the vanguard, most Hollywood filmmakers would have first come across Digital Video for dramatic features by the Dogma95 crowd, mainly Lars von Trier and Thomas Vintenberg. And while it's great to see my favourite Hollywood film director Francis Ford Coppola, on the lis, I think more credit goes to his soundman and editor Walter Murch, though among his big coups was bringing German designed equipment (KEM and Steenbeck flatbed editors) and British production practices for sound post production systems, to Hollywood.

    By Blogger Dylan Pank, at 5:45 PM  

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