Lead, Don’t Follow—Innovation Lessons from iPad 2 Announcement
Whether Apple fans or not, you must have heard the new generation of iPad has been introduced to the world last week. As I read posts on our class blog wondering what to post myself, I ran across Xue Zhang’s post about the new iPad 2 announcement called “Is the Tablet Market Anything Beyond the iPad? So Far the Answer is NO!” and it reminds me of the concepts of innovation and value learnt in class.
With Steve Jobs taking the stage at Apple’s mega announcement, he revealed this magical wonder of iPad 2.o which is lighter, thinner, and full of great ideas. As we may all have learned, the new features of iPad 2.o include the much expected dual-cameras—with camera-focused apps like FaceTime, iMovie, and Photo Booth, the thin new contour, 3-axis gyroscope, and the 1GHz dual-core A5 chip which has drastically faster graphics processing.
We all know about Apple’s amazingly great products and services, but I think the most lasting legacy about Apple is being an an incredible engine of innovation with profitable growth. Apple has become a cult of personality. Steve Jobs, who seems to me to be more like a leader than a manager, has done a great job to lead the consumers, to build an enduring organization that will sustain itself long into the future beyond the tenure of the people that made it successful. Leading the consumer is one of Steve Jobs’ great strengths. In an interview shortly after the iPad was released in spring 2010, Jobs was asked what consumer and market research Apple did to guide the development of the iPad. He answered, “None, it’s not the job of the consumer to know what they want.” Thus it’s marketers job to find the products, the services, or new values that consumers don’t know they need yet. On the basis of emerging trends, insight into customer needs, and an instinctive understanding about what people want, a new-to-the-world product can be adopted by as many consumers as possible and have prolonged life cycle hopeful during the stages of grow and maturity.