The Seed of Apple’s Innovation

Wonderful article called The Seed of Apple’s Innovation at BusinessWeek. Fits with my studies, or rather the ones I just finished. The thing is that in a product life cycle you have technology first, with all the techy people being at the helm, but slowly you will reach a dominant design for the product category you are in and the marketing folks take over. Steve Jobs touches on that in that he thinks the error is in the sales/marketing guy being at the helm. I can fully buy into that. You need amazing sales people but the next big thing will not come from marketing in itself, it will come from the next technological innovation and you need to focus on that. Another thing Steve Jobs makes clear is that innovation, while supported by good processes, doesn’t come planned. The more you want to control it the less you get. Let people roam freely, give them some time to do it, give them the vision of where you want to go and what is important to you and then give them the capability, like Tom Peters said, to build prototypes. Fail forward fast.