Lessons From Apple - June 7th 2007 article in the Economist.com magazine:
1. The first is that innovation can come from without as well as within. Apple is widely assumed to be an innovator in the tradition of Thomas Edison or B ell Laboratories, locking its engineers away to cook up new ideas and basing products on their moments of inspiration. Apple is in short an orchestrator and integrator of technologies, unafraid to bring in ideas from outside but always adding its own twists.
2. Second, Apple illlustrates the importance of designing a new products around t he needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Apple has consistently combined clever technology with simplicity, and ease buying it online, easy enough for almost anyone to have a go.
3. Listening to customers is generally a good ides, but it is not the whole story. For all the talks of "user-centric innovations" and allowing feedback from customers to dictate new product designs, a third lesson from Apple is that smart coompanies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today.
4. Apple learned from its mistakes and tried again. Its recent computers have been based on technology developed at NeXT, a compnay Mr Jobs sset up in the 1980's that appeared to have failed and was th en acquired by Apple. The lesson is not to stigmatise failure but to tolerate it and learn from it.
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