Design Thinking and Innovation At Apple

design thinking and innovation at Apple a harvard business case that one 2013 BCCH case award the authors of the business case are Harvard Business School professors Steven Pompey and independent researcher Barbara Feinberg the summary and the presentation are created by Li Wei technology commercialization manager from agency for science technology and research Singapore the full business case is available from Harvard Business Review in 2012 Apple became the most valuable public rated company in history with $600 share price 620 billion dollar market capital and 100 billion dollar annual sales Apple success was not just the result of strategic moves or innate sense of market timing it is a surprising consistency in the way the company worked simply put the Apple way first design thinking those of us on the original Macintosh team were really excited about what we were doing the result was that people saw a Mac and fell in love with him there was an emotional connection that I think came from the heart and soul of the design team Bill Atkinson member of Apple Macintosh development team in the mid-1970s computers were typically housed in discrete locations and only used by specialists the notion of computer as a tool for individual work was unimaginable in the 1970s to help people love their equipment and the experience of using it the level of complexity needed to be reduced dramatically Apple's product starts with design from people's need and want the design of the product is not limited by technology the engineers are pushed to use the same kind of creativity and innovation to make it happen design is very well thought through it is beyond fashion the capacity and technology to build it is not commoditized and no compromise for the functionalities this is Design Thinking combination of user desirability technology possibility and market viability smallest of details are scrutinized not just the appearance of the product but also its functions features and packaging the design team kept on going deep until they found the key underlying principle of a problem then built on design is not just what it looks like and feels like design is how it works that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication second strategy and execution you can see a lot just by observing Yogi Berra major league baseball player and manager apples history began in 1976 it launched the first personal computer Apple 2 in 1978 in 1981 IBM entered the market with its PC that can be cloned since 1985 Apple's market share kept declining the board of Apple axed Steve Jobs in the following eleven years products and projects at Apple proliferated and consequence of various strategies and many of them failed the technology department process became more traditional and resembled approaches found at other companies process makes you more efficient but innovation comes from people calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea it comes from saying no to a thousand things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much by Steve Jobs everything changed after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 decisions were made to achieve the excellence in execution stopped licensing program eliminated 70% of new projects product line was reduced from 15 to only 3 website was launched for direct sales sophisticated marketing kept product development complete secret shutdown facilities and move them abroad inventory was reduced from months to a few days Apple also adopted the platform strategy for its products they designed the initial product as a platform with an architecture that accommodated the development and the production of the derivative products customer's experience was integrated into Apple's product design and development a lot of it empirically drives with iterative customer involvement Apple worked intimately with manufacturers and assured that their products be completely attuned to customers Apple's product always evolves the importance of design is a motivation to continued innovation rather than a static approach that assumes a single conclusion third CEO as chief innovator the really great person will keep on going and find the key underlying principle of the problem and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works Steve Levy author of the perfect thing company founders essentially imprint their organizations with their own personality characteristics and Apple Jobs is no exception Steve Jobs and Apple seem like interchangeable terms Steve Jobs drive for perfection was apples drive for beautiful elegant products and its superior operations Steve Jobs vision held that Apple's products were to be personal tools for individuals instead of enterprise solution Steve Jobs also had total hands-on involvement and decision making from strategy to product and service design to packaging forth bold business experimentation the greatest artists like Dylan Picasso and Newton risks failure and if we want to be great we've got to risk it - Steve Jobs when everyone was moving online Apple decided to move into retail and created every Apple store with the same painstaking focus on details against conventional wisdom of open platform collaboration community design transparency Apple insisted to develop and integrate its own hardware software and keep product launches secret Apple is also constantly learning adapting and evolving from the design of array of colors to black and white color theme from the closed developer community to the open developer platform from no compatibility for other OS to Windows compatible in summary the root of Apple's success was a set of principles with a deep commitment to great products and services at its core design thinking clear development strategy and execution its CEO as chief innovator and the rational courage to conduct bold business experiments for more presentations about innovation management and technology commercialization please visit WWE

Channel: Wei Li

Views: 191,215

Keywords: design thinking, apple, innovation, management, strategy

Id: ir3E-TEUk48

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 18 2016