His first outside recruit was a brash engineer who had worked in portable electronics at Phillips named Tony Fadell and his first technology find was a brand new Toshiba 1. One thing the Nomad had going for it was its capability of holding songs. The trouble was that the hard drive used to build the Nomad was the same hard drive that is used in laptops — which is just over 2. For the iPod, Rubenstein wanted a way to hold 1, songs but without the extra weight and size associated with using a standard laptop hard drive.
As far as he knew, there was no good solution for this problem. It was a tiny, 1. When Toshiba engineers showed it to Rubenstein, he knew immediately what it could be used for. A thousand songs in his pocket! But he kept a poker face. Jobs was also in Japan, giving the keynote speech at the Tokyo Macworld conference. They met that night at the Hotel Okura, where Jobs was staying.
So Rubenstein started negotiating with Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make. It seemed to be a core principle Apple relied on to foster innovation. For example, when talking about creativity with Wired, Jobs said the following:.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. When the iPod was finally released in , the feature everyone was talking about after using the iPod was the scroll wheel.
According to an article in FastCoDesign. The article explains:. No matter how challenging the innovation project is or how novel it needs to be, there are always ways to find inspiration by looking outside your own four walls by exposing yourself to the latest and greatest the world has to offer. Some of the best ways to do this are the following:. But other companies also had video game systems. But that shift from the Walkman to the double-cassette Walkman was an incremental innovation.
The transformational piece would have been an MP3 player. Sony actually had three MP3 players. There were different divisions warring with each other within the company. The units were coming out at a time when Napster, LimeWire, and others allowed anyone to share music for free. You never had to pay for music again. So it sat on the technology. At the same time, Apple decided to get into the music industry. And the company came through with a breakthrough innovation: The iPod. When Apple announced and launched the device, it was not the best-sounding music player.
It was actually predicted to fail because of these problems. It had a great interface, but its real success was the fact that it was a business-model innovation. Apple got users to spend 99 times more for music that they could get for free.
People were willing to go from free to 99 cents because they liked the iTunes store, they liked the ecosystem, and they liked the interface. Apple changed the music business. Sony wanted to be Apple.
Sony had all the digital IP and design — the same components Apple had. Then Apple released another breakthrough innovation — the iPhone. The iPhone singlehandedly destroyed 27 business models. Where do you go to get your film developed? Not a one-hour photo shop.
It is a textbook example of what Clayton Christensen dubs a sustaining innovation , a product aimed at existing customers that improves on what went before it and is able to demand a premium price. Except for a few dark years in the mids, Apple has always been very good at sustaining innovation. The former are bemoaning the lack of disruptive innovations; the latter are celebrating the steady flow of sustaining ones. In the two year period after the iPod, iPhone, iPad or whatever ships, everyone says Apple is innovative.
In the years of iteratively perfecting the vision, everybody says Apple is not innovative. The harder question to answer is whether Apple can remain successful and keep growing without another disruptive innovation. But while Android has rocketed past the iPhone in smartphone market share, its progress seems to have stalled recently while the iPhone marches on. It takes a different kind of innovation to do that. You have 1 free article s left this month.
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