On Innovation Part 2 (How Apple Does It)
Feb 04
Business, Technology apple, innovation 4 Comments
Back on the topic of innovation. I’ve been thinking about it a lot these days. We can’t talk about innovation for 5 minutes before someone invariably mentions Apple and how innovative they are. Well, I thought I’d take some people on a bit of a visual history tour so people can see where Apple gets their innovative ideas.
An old Gizmodo article shows the similarity between the iPhone calculator app and the Braun ET44 calculator.
Another article I found on Metro Hippie shows even more similarities between Braun products and Apple products.
I’m not trying to hate on Apple if that’s what you fanboys are thinking. The point is that Apple liberally “borrows” ideas from others that they see work well. The point is that Apple’s “concepts” are seen as innovations, but clearly, these designs were not dreamed up in the Apple ivory tower. More often than not, innovation comes from without. People get tunnel vision on what they are working on or they are too close to the problem that they can’t see how things could possibly work better. Sometimes what is needed is inspiration from a fresh perspective from those who look at the world from a different point of view.
Which brings me to one of the most famous quotes of all time:
Good artists copy, great artists steal. – Pablo Picasso
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Feb 05, 2010 @ 07:04:35
This is a really good article Pek. I didn’t realize that this was happening and that Apple’s designs were so heavily influenced by other products.
Feb 05, 2010 @ 12:56:09
I think that all these are examples of Apple innovations because innovation is the realization of an idea/invention regardless of its source. Although the ideas/inventions were sourced outside of Apple, they are all Apple’s innovations because Apple actualized them into successes.
One of the definitions I like is “innovation is turning ideas into cash” like Microsoft, Facebook and Apple have done with others’ ideas.
Oct 07, 2010 @ 09:31:12
In the case of Braun, the innovation did get turned into cash without Apple’s help.