Disruptive Innovation in the Smartphone Industry

This assignment delves into the concept of disruptive innovation within the smartphone industry, focusing specifically on Apple's contributions. It encourages students to analyze Apple's product strategies, innovations (like the iPhone), and their influence on shaping the competitive landscape of the mobile technology market.

Running head: TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
Technology and Innovation Management
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note

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TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Discussion and Analysis..................................................................................................................2
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References........................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Innovation is a field of study that is simply just a new method, idea or device. However,
it is also often regarded as the application of better answers that are meeting unarticulated needs,
new requirements or any already existing market needs (Fagerberg, Martin & Andersen 2013).
Inside the information and communication technology sector, the mobile phone industry has
become a very innovative segment. Technical advancements and new product proliferation have
molded this industry into an extremely dynamic one. This has happened even after the market
shares are extremely concentrated in the hands of a few giants in the industry (Cecere, Corrocher
& Battaglia 2015, p.162-175). Innovation is the core of every successful product, organization or
new venture. Apple Inc. is no exception to that. From their iPod to their Apple Newton to
iPhone, Apple, Inc. from the beginning itself have provided the pomp and performance. The
iPhone has transformed the mobile phone business completely, along with the internet economy
and society as a whole. Before iPhone, touchscreens appeared on Apple’s own Newton.
However, what made iPhone transformative in nature was the shift in the concept of
underpinning the whole iPhone project. Its designers made it into a full-fledged hand-held
computer making calls and browsing (Cartwright 2016, p.669-671).
Discussion and Analysis
Major Technological Developments That Contributed to the Success Of iPhone
Ron Wayne, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs together founded Apple, Inc. in 1976. After
Wayne left the company, Wozniak presented and designed Apple’s first computer, the Apple I,
to Hewlett Packard (HP). Even though HP was not impressed and did not pursue the venture,
Jobs and Wozniak continued to develop and sell their computers. In 1980s and early 1990’s, the
new versions of Macintosh and the new computers helped Apple do well in their sales. After
Jobs became the CEO of Apple, Inc. in 1997 he introduced the iMac, which did huge sales in
1998. From that point onwards the company started doing well. Under the leadership of Jobs,
Apple started the introduction of many new and innovative products one at a time. The market
bombing iPod and iPhone were introduced in 2001 and 2007 respectively. 2008 recorded an
iTunes store sale more than Wal-Mart. The innovation streak continued in 2010 with the
introduction of iPad (Apple.com 2017).

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Inside the computer hardware industry, technology plays a huge role in influencing the
success of any company. Innovation in technical progresses offers a faster, cheaper and better
electronic product each year, as it also is instrumental in creating a market segment because of
the new products and markets created. Thus, the technological innovation makes the industry
fiercer overall each and every year. However, even after the large increase in the worldwide
tablet shipments in 2011 reflected the interest of consumers shifting from PCs to smartphones
and tablets, there is the threat of new rival products leading to the decrease in the demand for
Apple products. Technological changes occur swiftly and Apple needs to keep up with these
changes in technology if they do not wish to be left behind their rivals (Mudambi & Swift 2014,
p.126-145).
Smartphones existed even before iPhone was introduced in the market. Still it was the
increasing technological innovative adoptions by Apple’s iPhone like larger touchscreen, the app
stores, ease of use option and an overall improved experience that helped iPhone become a
mainstream option. Apple has always been a company who had no qualms about technological
standards and easily tossed aside the old and ushered in the new. This is what makes the
company great. Apple has always repurposed and refined the existing technologies so that they
can fundamentally resonate with the end users. Multitouch technology existed long before
iPhone adopted it and made it into something magical. The fingerprint sensor technology was not
new, but was not used by consumers a lot. After Apple rolled out their touchID other
manufacturers followed suit after seeing the success it brought. The USB feature of Bondi Blue
iMac was bold and ambitious at the time it came out and then turned into a defacto peripheral
standard (Riikonen et al. 2013, p.563-572).
iPhone As A Disruptive Innovation
The term disruptive innovation was first coined by Clayton Christensen to define the
process by which products or services moves up the market, displacing established competitors
(Christensen 2013). Disruptive innovation for iPhone happened years ago in the mobile phone
industry. People struggled with the first iPhone as a disruptive innovation as it was
comparatively expensive at that time, but notice should be given to what it was. At the time of
iPhone’s introduction in 2007 the market rulers in the smartphone segments were BlackBerrys,
Palm Treos, Motorola Q’s and Symbian smartphones. At that time, the most important attributes

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were messaging and email, running applications, phone and speaker quality, durability,
information access on the web and good battery life. All the smartphone operating systems
during that time had developed from PDAs, regular mobile phones and pagers (Goggin 2012).
The iPhone was launched in 2007, with a large screen, powerful processor and OS and a
huge internal memory. It even boasted of an innovative user experience that used the hardware
power with zooming, fluid scrolling and the capacity to repaint the screen swiftly. At the time of
its launch it was not a very good smartphone according to the standards of that time. Typing was
problematic and email function did not work properly. Phone and speaker quality was
comparatively poor, the overall phone was fragile. Full internet access was available from the
web browser, but was actually unusable. But iPhone moved past that (Support.apple.com 2017).
Steve Jobs described the phone as internet in our pockets and of good value because of
the phone, iPod and internet function availability. Smartphones at that provided access to
internet, but with a bad user experience. Apple made use of WiFi for providing the internet in the
pocket experience to its users via the iPhone, which ultimately made the Safari and Google maps
use an incomparable experience. This characterized a new market disruptive innovation (Golijan
2013).
The path followed by the disruptive innovation was bringing improvement in the iPhone
as a competent computing platform and the bandwidth on the wireless network. Apple added
more memory, better screens, appstore, and faster processors. The faster wireless network speed
enabled a WiFi like experience to turn into a wireless network, bringing in the actual disruption
and the whole sector of smartphone manufacturers of got disrupted. Creating a WiFi experience
and then translating it to the mobile network as soon as the capabilities bettered is what is tagged
as a network disruption. Containing full access to internet and powerful application over the
wireless network is what has redefined the meaning of smartphone. Newton was supposed to do
for the PDA market what iPhone ultimately went on to do for the mobile market. It sported a
sleek design and even had several interesting features (Panizzi & Vitulli 2012, p. 782-783).
Innovation Theory
It's basic to observe that the condition Apple made with the iPhone was vastly not exactly
the same as what was expected by Christensen's model of disruptive innovation, regardless of the

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way that thinking back his theory of value chain evolution was accurate. That is the reason after
the iPhone was accounted for, Christensen foreseen the device to miss the mark. As showed by
Christensen, all together for an invention to be truly "disruptive", it must start as something with
cut down performance yet after some time finishes adequate performance to get the bigger piece
of a market at a much lower price. That is not what Apple did. From the soonest beginning stage
the iPhone has gave off an impression of being a first class and high-price plan that people
hurried to a significant long time (Christensen, Raynor & McDonald 2015, p.44-53).
The major theory of "Integrative Innovation" is the likelihood that a market's ability to
grasp more performance and hold higher prices will augment as showed by the number and value
of jobs to be done that have been consolidated into one device in a way that is clear and easy to
use. Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation expect that remembering the ultimate objective
to be disruptive, products must focus on one job to be done, start at the low-end, upgrade
performance after some time and over the long haul end up being satisfactory to get a far
reaching some portion of the market (King & Baatartogtokh 2015, p.77). This new framework is
in a general sense the inverse. As opposed to starting as not satisfactory and moving in
performance and cost, Integrative Innovation is tied in with solidifying distinctive jobs into one
and influencing an unrivaled/high-to cost respond in due order regarding begin with and quickly
moving down in cost to get sweeping parts of the market. iPhone fits this theory awesome. In
September 2007, just two or three months after launch, Apple decreased the price of the iPhone
altogether and inside two or three years even developed a lower-cost model called the 5C
(Chemers 2014). The best part about Integrative Innovation and Disruptive Innovation is that
they can agree smoothly together and basically address two negating sorts of preoccupation
changing innovations.
Failure of Apple Newton
As believed among the product lore, high profile gadgets that get lost or killed are more
often than not are comparatively more interesting than the ones that succeed. Yet in the history
of those killings, nothing can be compared to the situation with Apple Newton MessagePad. The
product was not simply killed; it was violently slain in its young age by one of technology’s
great men. Sadly, it was a remarkable device, a product whose influence we still sense today. At
that time, handheld devices were just a matter of science fiction. With Newton, Apple set out to

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create an entirely new device, a completely new class of computing. The idea was to make
computers lip into the pockets of people and go with them out in the world. In fact, the pocket-
based design was a core requirement. The requirement of the device included having a pen, a
radio working on a pager frequency, designable built in forms and templates, and having the
capacity to act as a seamless input device for a PC. The number one requirement it had to fit in
was inside people’s pocket. Focus was given on width to make the holding experience more
secure and comfortable (Nair & Leng 2012, p.21).
The result of all these work and effort gave birth to a completely new form of device that
ran a completely new and bold design language. The only major problem has handwriting. By
1993, they barely got it functioning when they started shipping it. Handwriting recognition was
decided to be Newton’s killer feature, and yet it went on to become the main feature that killed
the product. Character recognition problems in Newton became the centre of the jokes, most
commonly in Doonesbury comic strips. The situation was devastating. The negativity was a huge
blow to the team who had dedicated everything into the Newton. They immediately went back to
work and got the glitch sorted. However, it was too late. The character recognition feature got
corrected and it came out just flawless and phenomenal. However, there came out another
stumbling block – the once joy to use device never got a second look. The biggest clampdown
for Newton was that Steve Jobs himself hated it because of the poor performance and even
mocked the novel input mechanism. At that time, Apple had way too many projects and there
was nothing more to do with Newton. Looking back, Newton had lofty goals that were out
before the necessary technology to sustain it become commonplace (Honan, 2013).
Conclusion
People wondered what made Apple, Inc. so successful. The main determinants are Jobs’
leadership and visionary approach towards innovation, and quality of product Apple delivered.
Apple’s operations have been effective from the beginning itself, and they have been able to
garner the required attention and sales volume for moving ahead. Disruptive or not, Apple has
been able to capture the market share and people’s mind as being the greatest mobile company
ever.

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References
Apple.com. 2017. Apple. [online] Available at: https://www.apple.com/ [Accessed 21 Aug.
2017].
Cartwright, J., 2016. Technology: Smartphone science. Nature, 531(7596), pp.669-671.
Cecere, G., Corrocher, N. & Battaglia, R.D., 2015. Innovation and competition in the
smartphone industry: Is there a dominant design?. Telecommunications Policy, 39(3), pp.162-
175.
Chemers, M., 2014. An integrative theory of leadership. Psychology Press.
Christensen, C.M., 2013. The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to
fail. Harvard Business Review Press.
Christensen, C.M., Raynor, M.E. & McDonald, R., 2015. Disruptive innovation. Harvard
Business Review, 93(12), pp.44-53.
Fagerberg, J., Martin, B.R. & Andersen, E.S. eds., 2013. Innovation studies: evolution and future
challenges. OUP Oxford.
Goggin, G., 2012. Cell phone culture: Mobile technology in everyday life. Routledge.
Golijan, R. 2013. Steve Jobs' greatest products. [online] msnbc.com. Available at:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44805821/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/steve-
jobs-greatest-products/ [Accessed 21 Aug. 2017].
Honan, M. 2013. Remembering the Apple Newton’s Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact.
[online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2013/08/remembering-the-apple-
newtons-prophetic-failure-and-lasting-ideals/ [Accessed 21 Aug. 2017].
King, A.A. & Baatartogtokh, B., 2015. How useful is the theory of disruptive innovation?. MIT
Sloan Management Review, 57(1), p.77.
Mudambi, R. & Swift, T., 2014. Knowing when to leap: Transitioning between exploitative and
explorative R&D. Strategic Management Journal, 35(1), pp.126-145.

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Nair, P.B. & Leng, Q.A., 2012. The Sweet and Sour Apple: The Case of CEO Strategies at
Apple Inc. Vidwat, 5(1), p.21.
Panizzi, E. and Vitulli, D., 2012, May. iPhone interface for wireless control of a robot. In
Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (pp. 782-
783). ACM.
Riikonen, A., Smura, T., Kivi, A. & Töyli, J., 2013. Diffusion of mobile handset features:
Analysis of turning points and stages. Telecommunications Policy, 37(6), pp.563-572.
Support.apple.com. 2017. Apple - Support - Technical Specifications. [online] Available at:
https://support.apple.com/specs/ [Accessed 21 Aug. 2017].