Internal and External Factors - Influence on Business
Internal and External Factors of Apple, Inc. MGT/230 October 8, 2012 Donna Clayburn Internal and External Factors of Apple, Inc. Innovation at Apple Inc. is apparent in every department and every product they release. Kaipa states Steve Job was a brilliant leader, and magical speaker, he could entrance, enthrall, and simply bring others around to his way of thinking. Many people buy Apple products because of what Kaipa refers to as the reality distortion field; Jobs could reframe a problem in a way that convinces others to buy into his way of thinking and doing. The distortion field Kaipa refers to was simply a way of acting on the problem with a new mental model; frame the problem differently and gain new insights and new approaches that enable a new solution. The solution itself may not be innovative; however, the reframing of the problem allowed employees to see old problems with a new set of eyes and that was the groundbreaking key to the Jobs approach to internal innovation (Kaipa, 2012). The internal innovation bleeds over into the external consumer aspect of Apple products. Looking at iPhone for example, in 2005 Jobs collaborated with Motorola on the Moto Rokr phone with a convergence of iPod, phone, camera, and touch screen into a tablet. Job moved the focus of this type of technology over to the iPhone in 2007, after Apple announces their intention to enter the market with iPhone Kaipa quotes Steve Balmer of Microsoft as saying: “500 dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that is the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard. This makes it not a very good email machine… Let’s take phones first. Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by
References: Kaipa, P. (2012, May/June). Steve Jobs and the art of metal model innovation. Ivey Business Journal, 76(3), 1-5.