Failure pattern
Kodak and the digital camera it invented but didn't commercialize
A photographic film company actually invented an early digital camera internally but delayed commercializing it out of concern for cannibalizing its highly profitable film business, ultimately losing the market it helped create.
This photographic film and camera company's engineers built one of the earliest working digital camera prototypes years before digital photography became mainstream — the invention happened inside the company that would eventually be destroyed by the technology it created.
Internal reluctance to aggressively commercialise the digital camera stemmed largely from a rational-seeming but ultimately fatal concern: the company's core profit engine was film and film processing, and a successful digital camera would directly cannibalise that highly profitable existing business.
This hesitation gave other manufacturers — without an existing film business to protect — the room to commercialise and improve digital camera technology aggressively, eventually making film photography a shrinking niche rather than the mainstream product it had been for decades.
By the time the original company committed fully to digital, competitors had already captured the market position, brand association, and manufacturing scale advantages in digital photography that proved impossible to reverse.
the lesson
Protecting an existing profitable business from a disruptive technology you yourself invented is one of the most common and costly strategic mistakes — the innovation itself isn't the risk; the reluctance to cannibalise your own revenue with it is.