Article: Space and Imagineering

[larworth]

Some comments about MISSION:Space and the future of Imagineering. article

"Space is as ambitious as anything we've ever done," says Don Goodman, president of Imagineering.

I'm getting more and more excited about this attraction. It sounds like this really is a first class effort. That doesn't guarentee a great attraction, but it is nice to see them trying to do something great once again.

On to the more sober topic

Disney, the global entertainment megalith, is trying to determine just how much of the Imagineering budget can be slashed without silencing the cash registers ....... "Disney executives ask, 'How tiny can Imagineering be and still maintain a strategic advantage,'" says Ken Wong, a former president of the group who left in 2000. "Years ago, I was in discussions about whether Imagineering should be zero." Competitors like Universal Studios do much of their theme park development using contractors, keeping fewer than 100 creative employees on the payroll. These days, executives wonder whether Disney should follow that model, outsourcing as much as possible and working its magic with off-the-shelf technologies instead of those developed in-house.

"Disney is in a bear trap right now," says former Imagineering executive Larry Gertz, who left earlier this year. "They're incredibly investment-averse. But the problem is, if you don't fund the Imagineers to constantly come up with something new, you lose a big piece of what the brand means — which is that you go to the Disney parks to see stuff you can't see anywhere else."

I think Gertz summed it up well.

Imagineering is obviously a big expense, but one that is a cornerstones of their competitive advantage. From a business perspective I'd want to make sure I didn't jeopardize a key core competence of mine by trying to get it as "tiny" as possible. One must be mindful of "trimming the fat", but I fear they will keep chipping away until the quality of the work (and not just the size of the budget) has a negative impact on our experience.