The term Mickey Mouse has become synonymous with shoddy goods. In fact in one dictionary a definition reads: "Substandard, poorly executed or organised. Amateurish". A little surprising perhaps for an iconic cartoon character that defines the Walt Disney Empire! A corporation employing nearly 200 000 staff worldwide. I wonder if the universality of Mickey Mouse combined with "his" screen persona as an imitated small rodent, speaks for the global impact of Disney Studios as a successful provider of animated caricatures rather than the inferior quality of the product! This Blog isn't meant to be comprehensive, but is intended to give you some food for thought in planning your business ideas and in particular addressing the issue of "long term resilience".
The "story" of the Walt Disney studios (which you can read about here and many books have been written) represents an interesting case study of the successful development of a major corporation which began as a start up first as a collaboration with cartoonist Ubbe Iwerks, with whom he founded "Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists" in 1920 and more successfully, in partnership with his brother Roy, they formed "Disney Brothers Studio" in 1923 in Hollywood, which was rapidly becoming the hub of the US film industry. Even before Disney Brothers was formed, Walt Disney was producing short animated cartoons, called "Laugh-o-Grams", in 1921. What strikes me about this is the choice of name, which might sound dated now, but nearly 100 years ago, I suspect was a brand name, way ahead of its time. Now let's just think of the technology changes from 1920 to 2015. The first cartoons were hand drawn onto a new material called celluloid (as all of you scientist will know, is a polymer of carbohydrate made by nitration of cellulose and camphor, originally). The number of hours required to produce draft sketches, story-boards and ultimately hand drawn and coloured frames on film, is equivalent to sequencing the human genome by manual methods (well that's the best analogy I could come up with!).
The need for highly skilled artists, the intensity of the work and the demands (to come) for more sophisticated animation, soundtracks that appeal to a mass audience, together with the transition from film shorts to full length feature films, represents an interesting study in managing business growth with a fixed technology. In fact hand drawn animation continued at the Disney studios until the 1960s (you must have all seen the Jungle Book!). But the transition from the exquisite quality of the early Disney productions to "photocopied" animations led to the company's 1960-1980 slump. In fact it wasn't until digital technologies were introduced that the fortunes were turned around. Partnerships with the small start up company Pixar, their subsequent acquisition and the recent acquisition of the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas has stabilised the Disney empire once again. (Did you know that Steve Jobs of Apple fame was a founder of Pixar!).
It would be interesting to look at a time line of employee numbers between 1923 and the present: however I believe that a team of around 10 individuals were at the creative heart of Disney with a massive infrastructure supporting production, distribution and of course....merchandising! 
It is worth just thinking a little longer about merchandising, since this has become the route for profit in many different businesses. Musicians sell very little in the way of hard copies of their music, concerts are prohibitively expensive to mount, music copyrighting can be lucrative for some, but merchandising gets the investors excited more than anything! So, in many ways, Disney started as an innovative company, grew through public demand, especially around the austere times after World War II, but by acquisition, technology switching and by embracing merchandising (think Disneyland!), the company is buoyant as ever today!
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