Like two ships passing in the night, Kodak and Facebook are exchanging places at the alter. While Facebook is prepping for perhaps the greatest initial public offering in the history of the planet, Kodak is making its last few steps of a twenty year descent from the pantheon of corporate America.

What made Kodak a great company had nothing to do with its cameras and film - the two main staples that drove the company to $10 billion in annual sales. In fact, its demise likely came from the fact that it thought of itself as a manufacturer, even a chemical company, more than anything else. Kodak’s ultimate failure was due to an identity crisis, never fully understanding why its customers were gobbling up its products.

Kodak, in its heyday, provided the richest form of self-promotion for humanity. It provided the pictures of peoples lives. Kodak told the stories, through black and white, and color, and slideshows, and snap and shoot, and “on the count of three.” It littered America with one hour processing, so that people could instantly reflect back on who they were. This had nothing to do with manufacturing, and everything to do with pulling at the heartstrings of a society.

Along the way, they turned into a global behemoth and a bedrock of the Dow, employing tens of thousands of people, creating billions of dollars of wealth all while slowly building the fortress that would finally block its view of its true value. Even as recent as 2005, Kodak was scurrying to innovate in the digital world such as launching O-Foto, a precursor to services like Picasso and Shutterfly.

What if Kodak, at that time, had taken a step back and realized its true value? What if it had asked the question “How do we innovate our ability to help people promote and reflect on their lives?” Isn’t that what Facebook has become? What if Kodak had built a bridge from the digital photograph to the digital identity? While they were likely sitting around calculating how much they could charge for printing and shipping a picture from their website, and selling “photo gifts” -- coffee mugs and picture frames, which were the profit generators for their service -- couldn’t their brain-trusts have foreseen that they were sitting on the bedrock of what would eventually be referred to as Social Networking? Was it really that far of a leap?

Today’s established businesses should take note of Kodak’s failures. Traditional organizational structures, traditional product management, and traditional customer engagement will likely fail to produce the innovation to keep established companies alive. There are great examples of companies that instill a discipline of innovation and “break the mold” thinking, in the face of short-term shareholder appeasement. 3M is one such company, insisting that 40% of revenue comes from products less than four years old. Salesforce.com is another, by staying true to three major upgrades a year.

The albatross for most organizations is the potential cannibalization of their existing franchises. Kodak fell into this trap with digital photography, denying its imminence because it was printing money with film. Oracle and SAP have made similar mistakes in their long-term avoidance of the cloud. Organizations that become agile enterprises -- being customer obsessed, iterative, and social -- stand a much better chance of leaping from their current business model to future business models that still promote the essence of their identity. Oracle should have realized ten years ago that they were not a software company; their customers could care less about software. Rather, they were a business automation company, and newer models of disseminating that business automation -- i.e., the Cloud -- should have been at the forefront of their thinking.

Like Google today, Facebook, in a decade’s time, will likely be scrambling to catch-up with the next evolution of commerce and collaboration. The barriers protecting the disruption of Facebook’s stronghold are lower than we think, and rest more with their brand and name recognition. But what Kodak’s story reminds us, more than anything, is that innovation does not require an organization to create a new identity.

Sometimes 'innovation' is only a matter of understanding what that identity actually is.