Steve Jobs: Master of Innovation

        Many of the products available to us in today’s marketplace follow the same trend of “be like the rest and you will keep your customers happy.” There are few companies who have taken the risk to create something new and provocative so that consumers are presented with an “alternative.” For my first blog post I would like to focus on Steve Jobs Apples former CEO. Steve Jobs used his innovation to propel his company into a league of its own which has gained an almost “cult” like following of consumers. So the question that everyone wants to know the answer to is “How did he do it?” the answer is innovative leadership skills. Jobs understood that in order for his company and ideas to be successful he needed to think differently than everybody else and that’s exactly what he did.

        In order for Jobs to achieve success he constantly thought with the mind of a consumer saying, “What could I use in my everyday life that would make things easier for me?” and achieved unique ideas by putting together a team of very diverse employees. Diversity at Apple is what has defined its corporate identity; it is a place where people want work because they can be creative and not have to worry about getting fired for an odd idea. A great example of this would be the iPhone, manufactures and cell phone providers told jobs that no consumer would ever pay $400 dollars for a phone but when the original iPhone hit markets in 2007 it proved all of those companies wrong. Apple created something that consumers had been waiting for, something unique and easy to use. Steve Jobs could have thrown the iPhone on the back burner after being told off by various different companies but his intuition told him to stick through it and as we all know today the iPhone paved the way for smartphones. In almost every business aspect Apple is consistently 1 step ahead of everyone else.

        Coming full circle it may be true that if you produce a similar good with a few tweaks it will see profit. But companies like Apple who produce that creativity first strive in the marketplace and make substantially more profit on their products than their competitors because they have delivered the product that the consumer wanted instead of what the company thought would be best. Steve Jobs is a superhero for the technology world; his management skills have paved the way for other companies to be innovative and assured them that taking risks can be a good thing.

-Eddie Nemeth

Kuang, Cliff. "What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us? | Fast Company." FastCompany.com - Where Ideas and People Meet | Fast Company. Web. 02 Oct. 2011. <http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us>.