From relay maker to control-equipment maker — and the world’s first contactless proximity switch (1960)

Making a market where none exists

The heart of this decision is that instead of competing in an existing market, OMRON stepped first into a field where the market itself did not yet exist. What Tateishi chose, in order to escape dependence on the single product that was the protective relay, was not a diversification that followed other companies but the act of defining for himself a demand — automation — for which Japan did not yet even have a word. Developing one control component after another in-house, and getting ahead of the world’s largest firms with a contactless proximity switch, can be read as fixing early a style of management that pre-empts markets through technology.

That said, the pioneer who opens a market does not necessarily take the fruit of it. The contactless switch, too, was followed a few years later by larger latecomers. Even so, the decision that moved the company off the single leg of protective relays and onto the ground of a control-equipment maker was the base from which OMRON later expanded into factory automation, social systems and healthcare. That a founder made the question — create the market rather than chase it — the centre of the business at the age of fifty-five is instructive still.