Originally posted by goubejp My experience in working in R&D is that good management yeald to better results than spending tons of money. Engineers are not traders, they need to be motivated and are generally impassioned people.
Good engineers are passionnated (I'am passionnated but one could say I'am no good). But even if your are passionnated, I agree that you need management at help. Time spent in stupid process, never doing anything innovative is killer engineer. You need your engineers to enjoy their job.
---------- Post added 10-05-14 at 01:45 PM ----------
Originally posted by fuent104 I work for a cinema camera rental company in Los Angeles. In addition to renting existing equipment, we have an in-house engineering team. The company has developed several products that have made significant waves in the industry, and we have a constant stream of new customers who would never have heard of our company, if not for the new products we offer.
This idea that R&D is prohibitively expensive is arrogant and uninformed. Unless one has intimate knowledge of Ricoh's R&D budget and existing catalog of R&D work, one can't possibly know what is "prohibitively" expensive and what is not. Who's to say such work hasn't been in progress for years? Who's to say Ricoh is incapable of looking at the published patents by other companies, or the more than a century's worth of optical scientific literature?
The myriad of camera companies that have sprung up in the last few years, especially the very small ones, should show us that it is possible for a company to make a product, and that, if the product fills a need or is of sufficient perceived quality, it can attract customers.
Right now, Sigma's lens designs are garnering more prestige then Pentax's. SIGMA. That should tell us all we need to know. If Sigma can come up with lenses that are some of the crown jewels of the photographic world, I believe Ricoh can, too. If they don't want to, that is up to them. But I don't think any of us has any reason to think they are not capable.
Unless some of us have information that the rest of us do not.
I agree with you that the photographic industry is a small industry with small investments where it is easy to start. Almost nothing prevent you to be the next Sigma and Samyang is already doing well with just manual and heavy lenses ! Bodies are also very easy to design, for the most part it is puzzle with a few parts. All the hardware is standard hardware except maybe pentaprism & mirror and sensor, and this you can outsource. What is more difficult then is to get the network effect of your own mount.
This cannot compare to the R&D Intel put into a new processor or AIrbus put in a new plane.