Setting up the Third Division: making endoscopy a real business (1969)

Taking on the customer community, and making the market

The heart of this decision is that, before building an excellent product, Olympus took on the very gathering of doctors who would use it. By running the customer community’s own institutions itself — the secretariat of the nationwide gastrocamera study group, liaison meetings with physicians, a training foundation overseas — it fed clinical voices back into its products and thickened its distribution at the same time. Leading on superior technology alone does not win share in a medical market. The Third Division of 1969 was the first decision to turn the company’s resources squarely toward that machinery.

The gastrocamera had begun at a doctor’s request and at first held nothing that could be called a business strategy. Naito Takafuku put that peripheral activity into the vessel of the Third Division and set out to grow it across two fields, medical and information. The facsimile machines of the information side never became the main act, but medical endoscopy grew into the one core business that would remain to an Olympus that later let go of both cameras and microscopes. It was not the cameras that symbolized the company but the endoscopes, begun at its margins, that came to define the character of the whole. The founding of the Third Division in 1969 was the first step of that long turn.