Sony managers had a problem. Racing to beat competitors to market, the electronics giant had spent tens of millions of dollars developing its first household robot. But building a personal robot that could do anything useful proved daunting, and Sony’s prototypes were buggy and unpredictable. How could the company establish a foothold in this nascent market without losing its shirt—or worse, becoming a laughingstock?
A version of this article appeared in the March 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.
