When the mantra “innovate or die” is invoked, two companies who are often mentioned as examples are Nokia and Kodak. But in what ways, exactly, did these two companies fail to innovate? and what lessons can we learn from their failures?

Here are 5 innovation blind spots that I identified that ultimately doomed them to failure …

1) They Defined Their Business Too Narrowly

Nokia began life in a small village in Finland, as a paper mill. It branched out into electronics in the 1960s and in 1979 created the first cellular network in the world. Soon after, Nokia launched the Mobira Senator, its first car phone.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nokia was the global leader in mobile phones. Profits were sky-high. The shareholders were ecstatic. No doubt Nokia thought its name would be the Kleenex of mobile phones.

Then, companies who were focused on the internet arrived, with people who understood that data, not voice, was the future of communication.

Fast forward to 2013, when Nokia’s hardware division was acquired by Microsoft. It was the end of Nokia’s glory days.

In a TechCrunch article, Daniel Gleeson, states that Nokia just didn’t grasp the whole concept of software, or the idea of developing an ecosystem around apps. Nokia’s focus was hardware and they got stuck there.

Adam Leach worked with Nokia’s original smartphone platform, Symbian, on projects including the Nokia Communicator, one of the first smartphones ever developed. Talking about his experience in collaborating with Nokia, he said the attitude was “it’s got to be a phone first, it’s a phone, phones sell.”

Nokia’s reluctance to switch from a focus on hardware to one on software left it eating the dust of other companies.

Similarly, Kodak made the monumental blunder of clinging to analog cameras instead of moving quickly to digital — A side note: Kodak invented the first digital camera. The reason, as Forbes notes, the members of the organization were so tied to the idea that their paychecks came from the sale of consumables such as film, chemicals and paper. No consumables, no profit, was their assumption.

So what is the lesson learned? Be careful about how you define your business. Make it broad enough to encompass the possibility of change and deep enough to reach down to the core concerns of your customers.

2) They Forgot About the Customer

George Eastman, founder of Kodak, once said his goal was to “make the camera as convenient as the pencil.” With that attitude, and the development of dry-plate technology, he launched both an iconic American company and the entire practice of amateur photography. The “Kodak moment” embodies the idea of being able to capture special memories, easily and inexpensively. Later, Eastman bet his company’s future on new technology (leaving dry-plate photography behind and embracing film) because he saw how the new would serve the customer better than the old. He similarly jumped on color film early, even though it was inferior to black and white film for a long time during its development.

Somehow, Eastman’s wisdom did not survive. Later on, leadership at Kodak thought only about profit and hung on to outdated technology.