Apple’s innovation strategy
involves terrific new products and
innovative business models.
Genius ergonomics make Apple products effortless to use. “Design
is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,” says
Steve Jobs.
Apple has repeatedly demonstrated with its
innovation management what a success user friendliness and design can
generate.
How can Apple ‘get’ design when so many other companies try and fail?
Here are some key elements of the Apple’s design process.
Matching Top-down and Bottom-up Strategies
Senior managers describe their dream products and outline what they want
from any new application. In response, design teams select and present the
best ideas from the paired design meetings to leadership, who might just
decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for new products.
In this way, the dream products morph into deliverables. Top managers are
also involved in the development process to ensure that there are no nasty
mistakes down the line.
Paired Design Meetings.
Every week, design teams at Apple have two meetings: a right-brain creative
meeting and a left-brain production one. At the creative meeting, people are
to brainstorm, to forget about constraints, to think freely, and to go
crazy. At the production meeting, the designers and engineers are required
to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually
work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of
any application. The balance shifts as the application progresses. Options
are kept for creative thought even at a late stage.
Developing Perfect Mockups
Creating a full-size model of a design or a device requires a huge amount of
work and takes an enormous amount of time, but it removes all ambiguity.
That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes
later on.
Apple’s “10 to 3 to 1″ approach
“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do,” says
Steve Jobs.
Apple’s strategy for innovation demands that design ideas to be generated in
multitudes. They are all run through a sort of artificial natural-selection
mechanism that kills off the weak and only lets the strongest ideas rise to
the top. Apple designers give themselves room to design without restriction
and come up with 10 entirely different
mockups of any new
feature. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those
three and then finally end up with one strong decision.
