RCA's Sarnoff Labs produced the image orthicon, NTSC color TV, an early videotape system, an early flat-panel-display, and lots of vacuum tube innovations.[1]
The big business mistakes were in the 1970s, when RCA tried to become a diversified conglomerate. At one point they owned Hertz Rent-A-Car and Banquet TV dinners.[2]
This seems to be the fate of many companies. Rockwell at one point somehow was producing the space shuttle while also having a division that made automotive components.
The Technology Connections video series on RCA's Selectavision CED home video system touches on this quite a lot (it was a horribly mismanaged project which took more than a decade to commercialize, by which time it had already been superceded by VHS/Betamax and Laserdisc)[1]. His main source for the information on the development of the CED system was the book "The Business of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc" by Margaret B. W. Graham.
