Case of Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple

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Until 1997, when Steve Jobs came back, the company he co-founded more than two decades slid to the edge of failure. Apple’s market share shrank to 4% in the PC market and annual losses exceeded more than $1 billion. Also, it stock was lower than it had been in 5 years. In order to get rid of this extremely bad situation and restore vitality of Apple’s innovation, Steve Jobs is committed to performing excellence in execution, developing unique product and platform strategy, paying close attention on customers needs and desires, and set design as motivation to continue innovation

Excellence in Execution

After returning to Apple in August 1997, Steve Job took immediate evasive actions to stop the licensing program, scrapped 70% of new projects that did not make sense, closing down two divisions, shutting facilities, and moving manufacturing abroad. For the purpose of changing the traditional distribution method, he came up with an idea of launching a website specifically for direct sales that would lead to a significant reduction in the production line. More importantly, in order to shift Apple focus back to innovation, on the design and development levels, Steve Jobs reapplied his vision of “think different” and “simplicity” and restates Apple’s commitment to understand people’s want and needs in order to develop “insanely great product”. As putting Apple back into the right track, Steve Jobs gave Apple a new life. His extraordinary reform and excellent performance in execution is one of critical elements that contributed to the great success of Apple.

In addition to Job’s outstanding performance in management, the other Apple’s developers also demonstrated an excellent execution in operating company. In 2009, Steve Job received a liver transplant, and Tim Cook took over Apple. During the period Jobs was absent, Apple’s product sales increased, stock price went up, and new generation IPad was released. Apple’s Executives worked intimately with manufactures and completely attuned to customers.

Platform Strategy

With the streamlined product portfolios, Apple has developed a clear platform strategy that makes easier for products and new technologies development. All the Apple’s products had a common OSX operating system, which gives Apple a great advantage over its competitors. The platform strategy provides a number of benefits to Apple, its suppliers, its employee, and its customer. For Apple, it is highly efficient and reliable to invest time and resource in design and develop components. For its supplier, it reliably provides higher level sharing and allows reusing assemblies, sub-assemblies, and parts at lower costs. For its employee, it is possible to gain knowledge and experience in designing, producing, and supporting the platform product. And finally, for its customers, it is effective to reduce repair, maintenance, and service result of its stable and reliable designs; also it is easier to accommodate products due to familiarity and commonality of design elements across its products.

Iterative Customer Involvement

Apple has always adhered to the notion that design should be driven first by user needs and desires. A participatory design shows that the best way to design software is with customers. In the process of iterative customer involvement, designers will watch how the target group used the testing product to understand the user expectations when they conduct a task, find problems when they got confused, and then figure out a way to fix it. For instance, due to the customer involvement, the cut-and-paste and editable dialog box were innovations. Another instance from Apple graphics application by Bill Atkinson proved that more user testing creates smoother software. Therefore, as the authors, Stefan Thomke and Barbara Feinberg, stated in the case that as the most valuable company in the world, Apple success come form a deep and consistent on commitment to understanding how people used computing devices and a desire to develop insanely great products, carrying out extensive testing to integrate customers experience into the design and development process plays an critical role to improve products and keep Apple’s competitive advantages.

Beautiful Products

Having been a leader in innovation for few decades, Apple is always full of passionate to deliver beautiful products to its customers. Innovation for “beautiful object” is a core value in the Apple’s heart. In fact, Apple pays close attention to seek new materials and manufacturing techniques to apply in its sleek of iPods, iPhones, iPad, and Mac computers continuously. The powerful design of IPod has gone through an innovation. After making the successful pristine white IPod, Apple started to create colorful IPod with the different materials and a new manufacturing technique. A grand design is considered to be capable to change traditional aesthetic standards and widely accepted by customers. Apple’s ability of change the popular trend by switching the pristine white IPod to the colors and new materials IPod suggests the importance of design as driver to innovation.

Apple is very powerful when it comes to innovation because the vision of innovation has always been existed in the every employee’s heart. They are able to understand customer’s needs and desires by building a very close integration with the customer in the product design and development process. After exploring customers’ product experience, Apple started to design and engine its products to put these needs into future oriented products. Apple spends a large amount of time on its product details, such as materials adaptions, and strives to the product design in order to make peoples live better. In addition, the whole organization lives a clear product and business strategy, and Apple has a group of professional management with an excellent CEO in execution. As stated above, Apple has sufficient capabilities to be good at innovation and to develop unique products.

CEO as Chief Innovator

Based on this case, a convincing research reveals that company founders’ personality characteristics essentially stand for their organizations image. There is no exception for Apple and Steve Jobs. Since he first came up with the idea of personal computers as a tool for individual work, Apple started to focus on problem solving for individuals when the tread in mid-1970 was creating enterprise solution. Also, the notion of simplicity as the ultimate sophistication raised by Steve Jobs has always been one of most important of Apple’s design philosophies that