A brief study of the Apple Inc.

1. Apple Inc.

2. Introduction.
 on April 1, 1976 Apple Inc. was founded.
Steve JobsSteve wozniakRonald Wayne

3. Company Profile.
• Total Revenue: US $ 182.795 billion(FY 2014)
• Profit: US $ 39.510 billion(FY 2014)
• Employees: 98,000
• No. of Locations: 437 retail stores
Source : wikipidedia.org
Tim Cook

4. The Innovators.
Apple is widely considered as the #1 innovative company in the world.
The company’s innovation strategy involves terrific new products and innovative
business models.
Apple innovation leaders think in terms of platforms and pipelines and relentlessly
push the pace
of innovation.

5. Innovation strategy
Matching Top-down and Bottom-up Strategies
• Senior managers describe their dream products and outline what
they want from any new application . In response, design teams
select and present the best ideas from their meetings to
leadership, who choose the best and feasible ones from them.
• In this way, the dream products morph into deliverables. Top
managers are also involved in the development process to ensure
that the process is smooth.

6. Innovation Strategies
• Apple focuses on innovative business models.
• The iPod and iPhone would not have had nearly as much impact if
they hadn't been matched with iTunes and the App Store
respectively.
• The App Store, for instance, the world’s largest collection of
mobile applications, offers hundreds of thousands ways to make
iPhone even better.
Business models
Innovative partnerships are an important part of the Apple’s innovation strategy.
Behinds Apple's successful business lies a web of suppliers and distributors.
Like, TPK Holdings is the world's largest touch-panel supplier by volume. The
Taiwanese company is the largest supplier of touch panels to Apple for iPads and
iPhones. More than 70 percent of TPK's revenues of $1.12 billion in the second quarter
of this year came from Apple
Innovative partnership.

7. Design Process
Apple has repeatedly demonstrated with its innovation management what
a success user friendliness and design can generate.

8. Paired design meetings
• Every week, design teams at Apple have two meetings:
• A Right-brain creative meeting
• A Left-brain production meeting
 At the creative meeting, people are to brainstorm, to forget about
constraints, to think freely, and to go crazy.
 At the production meeting, the designers and engineers are
required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea
might actually work.

9. Developing perfect Mockups
A full-size model of a design or a device is created .Although it requires a huge
amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time, but it removes all ambiguity.
That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10. Apple’s “10 to 3 to 1 approach”
• Apple’s strategy for innovation demands that design ideas to be
generated in multitudes.
• Apple designers give themselves room to design without restriction
and come up with 10 entirely different mockups of any new
feature.
• Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on
those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

11. Venture Stage.
• On, Dec 12 , 1980 Apple launched the Initial Public Offering(IPO)
of its stock to the investing public
• Innovate or Evaporate! The business can add new products and
services or it can acquire another firm to add products and
services to existing inventory. The entrepreneur turns into a
visionary leader and creates a culture where creativity is a
priority.

12. Approach towards generation of new ideas
Three Pronged Approach
• Need Seekers talk to customers to find out what they want and
generate new products based on that.
• Market Readers closely watch the market and then quickly create
incremental improvements on hot up-and-coming ideas already in
the market.
• Technology Drivers create brand-new stuff by letting their tech
experts experiment. This includes Google and Bosch.

13. Work Culture
• At Apple there is a common line of thinking that all employees
should be creative.
• Innovation is encouraged via incentives. That means that all
employees are looking for better ways to do things in their jobs.
They are rewarded, not shunned, when they try to alter the status
quo.
• With that as a corporate culture, new ideas thrive and so do new
products.

14. Unique acquisition Strategy
• Overall, Apple's history of business acquisitions has involved
relatively small companies. More often than not, the acquired
firms have directly resulted in key new apps, product features and
services that have
• Enhanced Apple's core business and enabled it to expand into new
ones immensely ,Siri Being a good example

15. New Product development stages
1. Product design
• Every product at Apple starts with design. Designers have the final say at
Apple, where the entire product conforms to their vision.
• This is the polar opposite of the way it works at other companies.
• Instead of the design being beholden to the manufacturing, finance or
manufacturing departments, these all conform to the will of the design
department.

16. 2. Apple New Product Process (ANPP)
• Once the design of the product has begun, the ANPP is put into action.
• This is a document that sets out every step in the development process of a
product in detail.
• It’s not an original Apple concept but was first applied at the company
during the development of the Macintosh.
• It maps out the stages of the creation, who is responsible for completion,
who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.

17. 3. Regular progress review
• The ET (Executive Team) meets every Monday to go over every product that
the company has in process.
• It is able to accomplish this because Apple has so few products in
production at any given time. Any that do not get a review are rolled over
to the next review Monday.
• This means that no product is ever more than two-weeks away from a key
decision being made.
Once a product is done, it is designed, built and tested again

18. The Packaging room
A room in the MARKETING building is completely dedicated to device
packaging. The security here is matched only by the sections of the building
dedicated to new products and to design.
The launch
An action plan for the product launch is generated, called the Rules of the
Road. It’s a top secret document that lists every significant milestone of a
product’s development up until launch. Each milestone is annotated with a
DRI (directly responsible individual) that is in charge of making that item
happen. Losing or revealing this document to the wrong people results in an
immediate firing, as noted in the document itself.

19. Managing Innovation.
-The Challenges

20. Leadership and Talent
• The biggest challenges for them were, While Steve was looked at as a technical genius,
he should also be looked at as a Marketing genius, given how effective he was at getting
enterprises to use new Apple products. Apple has been without Steve Jobs for a
significant amount of time and they had to deal with some amount of executive
departures as well.
• When the founder is also basically the company spokesman, the issues become magnified.
This is what makes things challenging for Apple.

21. Supply chain management
• Supply chain management is the process of logistics , creating
value by moving raw materials to finished products to customer
delivery Most consumers are unaware of supply chains, but their
importance can’t be understated.
• A slightly ironic point is that these issues seemed to crop up after
Tim Cook took the reins. Widely considered a "supply chain expert"
among the analyst crowd,

22. Technology challenge
Judging from the features of iPhone 4S, Apple’s radical innovation
seems to be running out of steam. The new phone is a marginal
rather than a radical improvement over its predecessor, both in
terms of its physical attributes and technological capabilities .
Added to it is the fact that Apple has been unable to work on
collaborations and pacts with other tech giants like IBM,Google and
HP as aggressively as they did in yesteryears.

23. Competition challenge
In the earlier years Apple’s barriers to competitors and innovation
magic have been formidable, and any company from Nokia to
Research in Motion to Hewlett-Packard that has tried to challenge
Apple have been trashed. In recent years, however, Apple has faced
a serious challenge to two of its blockbuster products, the iPad and
the iPhone ,from a variety of competitors in the form of Samsung,
Sony, HTC and most recently Xiaomi. In fact, according to a Nielsen
Survey, Android phones command a 43 percent market share,
compared to 28 percent for iPhones.