The electronic rice jar: from vacuum flasks into home appliances (1970)

What it means to change the principle of keeping heat

To dismiss this step as a flask maker adding a new product is to miss its core. What Zojirushi did was not to add one product but to transfer a single consistent purpose — keeping things hot — from the founding principle of vacuum insulation to the entirely different principle of electricity. When the glass rice container had run into its limits of fragility and poor heat retention, the company pursued the same purpose by another means, and the weight of the decision lies there. President Ichikawa Shigeyuki’s recollection that he agonised over it before taking the plunge conveys how far a single-product company had to travel to step into a technology outside its field.

Opening a window onto electricity, however, also carried Zojirushi into a different contest. It gained the pillars of its business in rice cookers and electric pots, but waiting on that ground were the large appliance makers, who push with plant and volume. What was entered as an extension of heat retention became, in time, a market shared with giant manufacturers. The window opened in 1970 brought Zojirushi both growth and the burden of price competition. A decision to change the principle of a technology opens a new market and, at the same time, invites in new rivals.