Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple.pdf

9 -609 -066 R E V : M A Y 1 , 2 0 1 2 S T E F A N T H O M K E B A R B A R A F E I N B E R G Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple Think different. — Apple Advertising Slogan, 1997–2002 On March 15, 2012, the day before its new iPad became available, Apple’s share price reached US$600 for the first time in its history —signaling solid financial strength and future growth prospects as world economies, and businesses, continued to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression. With a market capitalization of about US$ 550 billion and annual sales exceeding $100 billion, Apple was worth nearly three times the industrial giant General Electric, exceeded the value of Sony Corporation by a factor of 25, and became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. All the more amazingly, a scant 12 years earlier, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company’s share price had hovered around $5 and the future was uncertain at best. Jobs, after all, had already been fired from the firm he co-founded almost a decade earlier, and he was coming back when the company was nearly written off. Even so, through that difficult period, the core commitment to product design and development had stayed alive. Since being founded in 1976, Apple has been considered a leading designer and integrator of computer hardware and software. By 2012, it had fundamentally changed the computer, music, mobile telephone, and retail