Canon was well-equipped to undertake difficult product development projects
as it had accumulated a large and diverse technical staff of over 3,000
engineers, consisting of mechanical engineers (30%), electronics engineers
(30%), physicists (17%), chemists (10%), and computer-related and other fields
(13%). The electronics engineers had been hired in earlier relatively
unsuccessful efforts to enter the synchro-reader and electronic calculator fields.
The accumulation and interaction of personnel with these diverse technical
capabilities provided an environment that induced the creative tension which is
necessary to lead to synthesis and new information creation10. To further