Design Thinking And Innovation At Apple Case Solution

Often defying “conventional business logic”, Apple worked its way consistently towards designing with the sensibility that Jobs proposed in his designs. These designs and models of the Apple brand have come to be defined as “beyond fashion” and “zeitgeist” meaning “a sense of what is popular, fashionable, and trendy at the moment”. Apple has come this far by not thinking about what is fashionable in design; hence, innovating to create from that point forward. The end product is a “result of painstaking attention to detail”. The fact that the “beautiful, smooth, and consistent interface did not sacrifice features” is the secret behind Apple’s success.

2. Compare and contrast the innovation and design models discussed in CMR and HBR articles, with regard to the difficulty of managing innovation and linking innovation to experimentation (design thinking) as defined at Apple (use of a framework is appropriate).

Design of any product is a result of a brand’s innovation. As such, history has seen that most products focus on the design to the extent that they make it complex to the eye as well as to the experience (Bunduchi, 2011). For manufacturers of computers, mobile phones and other such innovative technology; the sense of producing a unique yet useful design of the hardware as well as the software becomes a challenge. This is because they think wrongly that complexity is the answer to the innovation which would produce an effective product for their brand (Nonala, 1991).

However, when it comes to Apple the case is entirely different. Apple has one theme, which resonates in its slogans, themes and company’s motto. ‘Think Different’-with that in mind, Apple became the “leading designer” of innovation and design (Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013). Throughout the company’s difficult and successful period, which marked the return of Steve Jobs, the “core commitment to product design and development” was kept alive (Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013). This policy led the brand to think smarter by being simpler. This simplicity in the designs of Apple products is backed by a consistency.

For the Apple team, the method to operate was the “Apple Way” (Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013). The innovation was the fruit of principles rooted in commitment to creating novel designs, having a clear vision of business strategy and courage to conduct business experiments, all backed by the “chief innovator”, the CEO (Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013). 

3. Why has Apple been so successful? What are the perceived drivers of their success, and provide a rationale for selecting them as your framework?

Sometime around the year 2000, Apple’s share price was struggling near $5. 12 years later; however, the company’s share price reached $600 for the first time. This was the sign that the brand was finally treading a rather steep uphill. The business kept recovering from the recession to a point where the market capitalization was about US$ 550 billion and the annual sales surpassed $100 billion. At such a moment, Apple was three times the worth of General Electric, and about 25 times more than Sony Corporation (Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013).