Shigeki Ishizuka Sony | Japan
No one likes to have their boss looking over their shoulder. But Shigeki Ishizuka, the head of Sony's digital camera division, says he is unfazed whenever Shizuo Takashino—Sony's executive deputy president and one of the legendary team that created the Walkman—drops by. "I look forward to seeing him," Ishizuka says with a laugh, saying he is always prepared for Takashino's frequent suggestion to "make it smaller."
Ishizuka can get away with a jest; he's got cred all his own. Although many divisions within the Sony juggernaut have stumbled in recent years, Ishizuka has kept his department at the forefront of the exploding digital camera industry by introducing innovative, sexy products. Virtually nonexistent even a decade ago, the market for digital cameras grew to $17 billion in 2003, and sales are expected to soar by another 39% this year, according to research firm IDC. And since introducing the DSC-F1, one of the first affordable digital cameras, in 1996, Sony
When you control parts design, you can integrate the whole package much more elegantly
— SHIGEKI ISHIZUKA, head of Sony's digital camera division
has gone on to capture an industry-leading 18%; Canon is close behind with 16%, while Olympus and Kodak have 13% and 12%, respectively.
Intriguingly, Sony is the only major digital camera maker without a traditional film background. Ishizuka, 45, considers that the company's greatest advantage. With no stake in the 35-mm camera market to protect, Sony was able to apply a fresh approach as consumers began switching to digital. The company's expertise in consumer electronics, video cameras and computers, and its emphasis on in-house design and development, he says, gave it an edge. "When you control every aspect of the parts design, and don't have to buy other companies' off-the-shelf components," Ishizuka says, "you can integrate the whole package much more tightly and elegantly—and often at lower cost," pointing to the pocket-sized DSC-T1 model in front of him as a perfect example.
In the spring of 2002, Ishizuka gathered his senior managers and declared that he was tired of incremental improvements. He wanted a radical leap: a camera roughly the size of a business-card case, but as capable as anything on the market. Cameras that size had been made before, he notes, but with sacrifices in image quality, screen size or zoom capability. "Our credo was: No compromises," Ishizuka says.
Tough talk, but not even Ishizuka realized just how high he had set the bar. Most of the camera's major components—including the battery, chipset and image processor—had to be designed from scratch. Engineers were sent back to the drawing board several times. The team's persistence paid off, however. When the camera (which features an impressive 5.1-megapixel resolution and a 2.5-in. LCD screen packed into an amazingly small body) went on sale in Japan in November 2003, it instantly became the nation's best seller—a phenomenon that has been repeated in virtually every market in which the camera has been introduced.
Ishizuka calls the DSC-T1 camera his personal Project X, referring to the name of a popular TV show that celebrates Japan's industrial and business triumphs of the past five decades. But he realizes that in this fiercely competitive business, the only thing that matters now is Project Y. "Our competitors can introduce similar products almost immediately," he says. Which means he is already planning Project Z, too. By Jim Frederick/Tokyo. With reporting by Yuki Oda/Tokyo
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