“For a company that looked doomed a decade ago, it has been quite a comeback. Today Apple is literally an iconic company. Look at your iPod: the company name appears only in the small print. Some of the power of its brand comes from the extraordinary story of a computer company rescued from near-collapse by its co-founder, Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after years of exile, reinvented it as a consumer-electronics firm and is now taking it into the billion-unit-a-year mobile-phone industry (see article). But mostly Apple’s zest comes from its reputation for inventiveness. In polls of the world’s most innovative firms it consistently ranks first. From its first computer in 1977 to the mouse-driven Macintosh in 1984, the iPod music-player in 2001 and now the iPhone, which goes on sale in America this month, Apple has prospered by keeping just ahead of the times,” The Economist reports.
Apple “inspires an almost religious fervour among its customers. That is no doubt helped by the fact that its corporate biography is so closely bound up with the mercurial Mr Jobs, a rare showman in his industry. Yet for all its flaws and quirks, Apple has at least four important wider lessons to teach other companies,” The Economist reports.
• Innovation can come from without as well as within
• Design new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology
• Sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today
• Fail wisely: learn from mistakes and try again
For the moment at least it is hard to think of a large company that better epitomises the art of innovation than Apple,” The Economist reports.
Full article here.
