At one point they tried to force the chemists who made their Infra Red film into early retirement only to discover that you couldn't take some fresh faced young grad form RIT and hand him the recipe and expect him to make it work. They ended up having a huge shortage until they could entice their old chemists back and then they still had to eliminate a few emulsions.
Your entire post can be summed up in the only reason why. What is taught in business schools.
Polaroid had a list of opportunities so long that it should be considered a disaster like 11 September. For example, digital paper was too little too late. They eventually sold the technology off. One of so many attempts, too little too late, included Zink and Oynx. Due to so business school graduates that routinely stifle innovation, Zink was not developed until 2001. Only because even business school graduates finally realized they had to innovate.
Once Dr Land stopped innovating, Polaroid was doing nothing more to advance mankind.
What is a Polaroid camera? A copier machine. And a printer. Advanced optics and graphical recognitions were other wide open opportunities for a company who also pioneers how human vision works. Obvious next steps - except to bean counters.
Meanwhile another nearby east coast company was also being as anti-American as Polaroid. Xerox. The HP All-In-One printers on every desktop is what Xerox should have been doing twenty years earlier. And could not because the east coast is dominated by business school graduates.
HP is the definition of a patriotic company. Their original market was tone (sound) generators for highest tech companies. Then moved into electronic test equipment that only the richest companies could need. Then moved into other completely new markets including hospital equipment, GPS (in the 1970s long before anyone heard of them), oscilloscopes (what TV companies would have developed if being innovative), power supplies, and computers. HP developed integrated circuits, microprocessors, and was a world leader in LEDs. Then into calculators and wrist watches. Then those 400 pound computers started becoming so small as to be desktop machines. They even took over every market that DEC once dominated.
HP moved into networking and office equipment. HP now does what Xerox and Polaroid both should have been doing if they were patriotic American. DIX - the three companies that developed Ethernet: Dec, Intel, and Xerox. Instead Xerox, Polaroid, etc were myopic as any business school graduate would be. That is where cancer originates.
An engineer or scientist does today what takes four or ten years later to appear on spread sheets. Therefore engineers and scientists are an expense; not an asset. In companies using a communism taught in business schools, then product people must be cost controlled. Which is why Kodak had the digital camera almost a decade before anyone else. And business school graduates could not measure its value on the spread sheets.
Because of their communism, they saw Kodak as the world's largest consumer of silver. That proved only business school graduates where making Kodak profitable. Higher profits due to larger cash flows. No business school disciple can understand something innovative. A definition of a business school graduate.
Innovation stifled for the same reason that GM did not sell the engine they developed over 30 years earlier. That same engine was inside every American patriotic car since the early 1990s. And still not in all GM cars in 2005. These are not accidents. These stifled innovations are what business schools preach.
Innovation cannot be measured on any spread sheet until long after that innovation is obsolete. Only those brainwashed in business school philosophies would not understand that. Most of the 'brainwashed' did not even go to business school. I would speculate that a majority reading this are also that brainwashed.
Polaroid was chock full of potential new products - and did nothing. Remember their self-focusing camera - the SLR680 and Sonar One Step? Today, that technology is found even on rear bumpers of many cars. Is an entire industry in automating factories. Polaroid pioneered the technology. But with management educated in business schools, it could not do what HP still routinely does every decade since before WWII. Or ditto for Cisco and Amazon. Other companies that thrive because business school graduates and another type of anti-American - stock brokers - are not obstructing them.