Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging

Article Review and Understanding
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Article Review and Understanding
Introduction
The article 'Capabilities, Cognition, and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging' is a management-oriented publication authored by Tripsas and Gavetti (2000) highlighting the organizational challenges amid change. The article’s main focus is the inter-linkage between managerial ideologies company capabilities and how they affect an organization’s adaptation to structural evolution. The authors’ presentation and depth of coverage in analyzing the Polaroid Company elaborate on the managerial beliefs of the company and its success in exerting resilience in the instant photography business. As the article provides an analytical study of organizational adjustment to change, expanding the focus beyond managerial cognition and internal capabilities would draw a more empirical conclusion to Polaroid’s delay in its immersion into digital imaging.
From the article’s title, it can be misleading since it indicates it as an analysis of the digital imaging industry in its entirety. A more suitable analysis to suit the title would include other companies in the digital imaging scene to show the comparative view of the capabilities, cognition, and inertia across all, or some of the organizations. Conducting a comparative analysis of other companies like Kodak and Fuji would expand the reader's and authors' viewpoints to include external environmental factors as influencers of managerial cognition and capabilities. This is because it offers a constricted view of only one company would inhibit the coverage of adaptation tools like the initiatives undertaken by competition or economic factors like investment losses incurred in drastic changes.
In this regard, the article considers managerial rigidity as the only reason that the company slurred in its launch of digital imaging. This is despite outlining the enormous investments that it had in the instant imaging technology. Reading this raises questions like did the loss in human and capital investments in developing and patenting the electronic imaging justify the managerial decisions? This opens a view that the delays in in...