Apple Inc.

Introduction.

on April 1, 1976 Apple Inc. was founded.

Steve JobsSteve wozniakRonald Wayne

Company Profile.

• Total Revenue: US $ 182.795 billion(FY 2014)• Profit: US $ 39.510 billion(FY 2014)• Employees: 98,000• No. of Locations: 437 retail stores

Source : wikipidedia.org

Tim Cook

The Innovators.

Apple is widely considered as the #1 innovative company in the world.

The company’s innovation strategy involves terrific new products and innovative business models.

Apple innovation leaders think in terms of platforms and pipelines and relentlessly push the pace of innovation.

Innovation strategy

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 their meetings to leadership, who choose the best and feasible ones from them.• In this way, the dream products morph into deliverables.

Top managers are also involved in the development process to ensure that the process is smooth.

Innovation Strategies

• Apple focuses on innovative business models.• The iPod and iPhone would not have had nearly as much

impact if they hadn't been matched with iTunes and the App Store respectively.• The App Store, for instance, the world’s largest collection of

mobile applications, offers hundreds of thousands ways to make iPhone even better.

Business modelsInnovative partnerships are an important part of the Apple’s innovation strategy.Behinds Apple's successful business lies a web of suppliers and distributors.

Like, TPK Holdings is the world's largest touch-panel supplier by volume. The Taiwanese company is the largest supplier of touch panels to Apple for iPads and iPhones. More than 70 percent of TPK's revenues of $1.12 billion in the second quarter of this year came from Apple 

Innovative partnership.

Design ProcessApple has repeatedly demonstrated with its innovation

management what a success user friendliness and design can generate.

Paired design meetings

• Every week, design teams at Apple have two meetings:• A Right-brain creative meeting• A Left-brain production meeting

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.

Developing perfect Mockups

A full-size model of a design or a device is created .Although it 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”

• Apple’s strategy for innovation demands that design ideas to be generated in multitudes.• 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.

Venture Stage.

• On, Dec 12 , 1980 Apple launched the Initial Public Offering(IPO) of its stock to the investing public

• Innovate or Evaporate! The business can add new products and services or it can acquire another firm to add products and services to existing inventory. The entrepreneur turns into a visionary leader and creates a culture where creativity is a priority.

Approach towards generation of new ideas

Three Pronged Approach• Need Seekers talk to customers to find out what they

want and generate new products based on that.• Market Readers closely watch the market and then

quickly create incremental improvements on hot up-and-coming ideas already in the market.• Technology Drivers create brand-new stuff by letting

their tech experts experiment. This includes Google and Bosch.

Work Culture

• At Apple there is a common line of thinking that all employees should be creative. • Innovation is encouraged via incentives. That means that

all employees are looking for better ways to do things in their jobs. They are rewarded, not shunned, when they try to alter the status quo.• With that as a corporate culture, new ideas thrive and so do

new products.

Unique acquisition Strategy

• Overall, Apple's history of business acquisitions has involved relatively small companies. More often than not, the acquired firms have directly resulted in key new apps, product features and services that have• Enhanced Apple's core business and enabled it to expand

into new ones immensely ,Siri Being a good example

New Product development stages

1. Product design• Every product at Apple starts with design. Designers have the

final say at Apple, where the entire product conforms to their vision.• This is the polar opposite of the way it works at other companies.• Instead of the design being beholden to the manufacturing,

finance or manufacturing departments, these all conform to the will of the design department.

2. Apple New Product Process (ANPP)• Once the design of the product has begun, the ANPP is put into

action.• This is a document that sets out every step in the development

process of a product in detail.• It’s not an original Apple concept but was first applied at the

company during the development of the Macintosh.• It maps out the stages of the creation, who is responsible for

completion, who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.

3. Regular progress review• The ET (Executive Team) meets every Monday to go over every

product that the company has in process.• It is able to accomplish this because Apple has so few products in

production at any given time. Any that do not get a review are rolled over to the next review Monday.

• This means that no product is ever more than two-weeks away from a key decision being made.

Once a product is done, it is designed, built and tested again

The Packaging room A room in the MARKETING building is completely dedicated to device packaging. The security here is matched only by the sections of the building dedicated to new products and to design.

The launchAn action plan for the product launch is generated, called the Rules of the Road. It’s a top secret document that lists every significant milestone of a product’s development up until launch. Each milestone is annotated with a DRI (directly responsible individual) that is in charge of making that item happen. Losing or revealing this document to the wrong people results in an immediate firing, as noted in the document itself.

Managing Innovation. -The Challenges

Leadership and Talent

• The biggest challenges for them were, While Steve was looked at as a technical genius, he should also be looked at as a Marketing genius, given how effective he was at getting enterprises to use new Apple products. Apple has been without Steve Jobs for a significant amount of time and they had to deal with some amount of executive departures as well.

• When the founder is also basically the company spokesman, the issues become

magnified. This is what makes things challenging for Apple.

Supply chain management

• Supply chain management is the process of logistics , creating value by moving raw materials to finished products to customer delivery Most consumers are unaware of supply chains, but their importance can’t be understated. • A slightly ironic point is that these issues seemed to crop

up after Tim Cook took the reins. Widely considered a "supply chain expert" among the analyst crowd,

Technology challenge

Judging from the features of iPhone 4S, Apple’s radical innovation seems to be running out of steam. The new phone is a marginal rather than a radical improvement over its predecessor, both in terms of its physical attributes and technological capabilities . Added to it is the fact that Apple has been unable to work on collaborations and pacts with other tech giants like IBM,Google and HP as aggressively as they did in yesteryears.

Competition challenge

In the earlier years Apple’s barriers to competitors and innovation magic have been formidable, and any company from Nokia to Research in Motion to Hewlett-Packard that has tried to challenge Apple have been trashed. In recent years, however, Apple has faced a serious challenge to two of its blockbuster products, the iPad and the iPhone ,from a variety of competitors in the form of Samsung, Sony, HTC and most recently Xiaomi. In fact, according to a Nielsen Survey, Android phones command a 43 percent market share, compared to 28 percent for iPhones.