CS875 - Unit 2 Individual Project - Game-Changing Innovation

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CS875
Unit 2 Individual Project
Game-Changing Innovation
Joel Maloff
May 2, 2020

Innovation, including game-changing ideas that emerge from mistakes or by accident, often require researchers have the time and opportunity to fail without concern about repercussions or failure is imminent, and almost any alternative is worth consideration (Tidd & Bessant, 2018).
One hundred years ago, the Cincinnati-based soap manufacturer Kutol was bankrupt and liquidating its assets. The principle product was powdered hand soap (Hiskey, 2015). When the Great Depression arrived, Kutol had managed to remain viable and found an alternative product in demand from the Kroger grocery store chain, also from Cincinnati, for wallpaper cleaner. It seems that coal-fired furnaces created a substantial amount of soot and that wallpaper required delicate and regular cleaning. Kutol had found a new, in-demand product, and the company was saved – for a time.
Unfortunately, this new prosperity was short-lived. Fifteen years later, coal furnaces were being replaced by gas and oil furnaces that were cheaper and did not require the delivery of coal. They also burned much cleaner and, with the introduction of vinyl wallpaper quickly cleaned with soap and water, wallpaper cleaner rapidly became obsolete (Hiskey, 2015).
Once again, Kutol was facing bankruptcy and failure. By chance, the sister-in-law of one of Kutol’s principals owned a nursery school and was looking for inexpensive materials for the children to use when making Holiday decorations. Without the benefit of the instant search tools that we have today via the web and the Internet, she found a magazine article that described how to use wallpaper cleaner for crafts! The children tried using the Kutol wallpaper cleaner, and it was a tremendous success (Hiskey, 2015). After removing the cleaning compounds from the paste, adding an almond fragrance, and adding different colors to the originally white product, they began marketing it locally to schools that had been customers of their cleaning product. The original name was Kutol’s Rainbow Modeling Compound. Not exactly a catchy or inspiring name. Eventually, the name Play-Doh stuck. A fragrance replaced the almond scent with one that consisted of flour, water, borax, salt, and mineral oil (Kindy, 2019).
Unfortunately, without much money for marketing and promotion, Play-Doh remained a Cincinnati area product without great success or exposure nationally. Again by chance, the company connected with the Captain Kangaroo television program in the 1950s – the 82nd most popular TV program of all time, even today, according to YouGov (YouGov, n.d.). By agreeing to provide 2% of all Play-Doh sales to the Captain Kangaroo production company, they received regular promotions on the nationally televised program, and soon sales were soaring from all over the United States. Whereas the Kutol wallpaper cleaner had sold for $0.34, Play-Doh sold for $1.50 for the same volume with less expensive ingredients (Hiskey, 2015)!
In 1956, Kutol became the Rainbow Crafts Company to sell Play-Doh, and the company was sold to General Mills in 1965 for $3 million (Kindy, 2019). That is not bad for a company that faced bankruptcy twice.
There are a variety of forces that contributed to the success of Play-Doh. However, it is instructive to consider that Kutol was struck by lightning twice – first with the morphing from powdered soap to wallpaper cleaner, and then secondly, luckily finding a new purpose for wallpaper cleaner that was obsolete due to changes in society and changes in technology. The obsolescence of coal heating and the introduction of vinyl wallpaper were technological changes. Society was changing in the 1950s. Children were watching national television programs like Captain Kangaroo and these became fertile grounds for new marketing efforts. Play-Doh comes from a heritage of catching lightning in a bottle, not once but twice! There was no intent for Kutol to sell anything other than powdered soap. They responded to a request to create a product that met a need. When the life of the wallpaper product was approaching an end, no one was thinking about reusing it as a children’s toy. That happened by accident. The lesson to be learned is that there may always be alternative opportunities. We need to have our eyes and ears open wide enough to recognize them!

References
Hiskey, D. (2015). The shocking story behind Playdoh's original purpose. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/the-shocking-story-behind-playdohs-original-purpose-2015-9
Kindy, D. (2019). The Accidental Invention of Play-Doh. Smithsonian Magazine.
Tidd, J., & Bessant, J. (2018). Managing Innovation (Vol. 6th Edition). Hoboken: Wiley.
YouGov. (n.d.). Captain Kangaroo. Retrieved from https://today.yougov.com/topics/media/explore/tv_show/Captain_Kangaroo


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