Apple Disruptive Innovation in Business

Apple Disruptive Innovation in Business Analyzing Apple's Ability to Deliver Disruptive Innovation And Re-order Entire Industries Apple's unique new product development process encompasses expertise from many of the areas of a company its competitors fail to use as effectively, in addition to having a keen sense of customers' preferences and unmet needs. This foundation of insight and intelligence serve as the catalyst of Apple's ability to sustain a high level of disruptive innovation and new product development (Tariq, Ishrat, Khan, 2011).

Apple's innovation process concentrates on creating a highly differentiated user experience, combined with a continual investment in an all-encompassing ecosystem to support their products (Dedrick, Kraemer, Linden, 2010). The ecosystem of music that made the iPod an industry standard and whose innovations disrupted many comparable industries is a case in point. The ongoing investment in the iPad ecosystem, complete with games, support for videoconferencing using FaceTime, millions of consumer-based and business games illustrate this point as well (Dedrick, Kraemer, Linden, 2010).

A Systematic Approach to Disruptive Innovation Apple's approach is markedly different than its competitors in that it analyzes unmet needs for functionality and combines those insights with a highly differentiated user experience. The focus within Apple's innovation processes is not just on the product, as its many competitors do. Instead Apple concentrates on the entire user experience and the availability fo content, software-based value-add and customization by the user to attain a highly differentiated and high value product that retains gross margins for the long-term (Tariq, Ishrat, Khan, 2011).

Meanwhile MP3 player competitors would resort to price wars and pushing their product development teams to fill up products with more features, Apple concentrated on how the actual device would bring value, entertainment, and increase in relevancy over time to consumers. The catalyst of this area of their disruptive innovation was the invention fo the Apple iTunes store and the aggressive direction Steve Jobs took of licensing content from major music producers at prices that made buying songs reasonable for consumers (Dedrick, Kraemer, Linden, 2010).

It was then not the device, but the ability to selectively customize the device for a given consumers' tastes and preferences in music that mattered. The iTunes ecosystem, now responsible either directly or indirectly for nearly one out of every four dollars Apple makes, was the most powerful catalyst of disruptive innovation the tech industry has ever seen (Tariq, Ishrat, Khan, 2011).

Disruptive innovation was created in the initial processes of how Apple develops products, and continues to this day in the approach they take to integrating suppliers into the process early, defining very high levels of performance for each members of the value chain as well (Dedrick, Kraemer, Linden, 2010). What is also unique about Apple's disruptive approach to innovation is the ability to learn from one product generation and use the insights and intelligence gained for the next product.

This is how Apple was able to transition so quickly from the iPod to the iPhone; the processes in place for evaluating user experience, combined with supply chain integration, led to a dramatically different phone anyone had produced before (Tariq, Ishrat, Khan, 2011). Apple was able to successfully do this by concentrating on the.