Lessons from Steve Jobs on Creativity and Entrepreneurship

Running Head: CREATIVITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Creativity and Entrepreneurship
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CREATIVITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP 2
Introduction
Modern technologies have long become an integral part of our lives. The use of
computers, mobile phones and, of course, the Internet for communication, work, entertainment
has become indispensable and even ordinary. These technologies are associated with a lot of
social, economic and political impact. However, most people are so carried away from these
technologies so much that they cannot think about how they were invented. Using the case of
Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple company, the paper will attempt to follow through his
creative paths and highlight some of the lessons which the current entrepreneurs should borrow
from Steve Jobs (Longenecker, 2010).
Biography of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs (1955-2011), patriarch of the new computational age and prolific creator of
gadgets, gave proof that a dream is only valid insofar as it is concretized in reality. His childhood
was not a bed of roses. Job was adopted after his father separated with his mother . However, this
did not take away Jobs ambition (Levy, 2011). His productive life was a rollercoaster of
passions, crazy and dreams achieved, was a disruptive of technology , which opted for
innovation as the only vehicle for the development of their products. He thought so much about
the user, that everything was created around his well-being; the user was the axis on which Jobs
was inspired for all his creations (Guglielmo, 2012).
Creative ideas and imaginations that kick-start the company
Steve Jobs did what many companies wanted, but in what they rarely managed to achieve
success. The further he advanced, the easier his products became (Daft & Marcic 2017). At the
forefront came not even the device itself, but the user. Their underlying creative ideas was to

CREATIVITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP 3
simplify what is already in the market. Steve Jobs did not invent any computer or phones but he
engages in creative modification and simplification of the existing ideas by adding new features,
applications and components. Jobs's dubious ability for concentration was combined in it with
the desire to simplify, concentrating on the essence of things and removing unnecessary.
Jobs got a taste for simple things when, having dropped out of university, worked at night
in Atari. Jobs' love for the simplicity of design was sharpened at the conferences of the Aspen
Institute, in which he participated in the late 1970s. They passed on the campus, built in the style
of the Bauhaus, with its clearly defined lines and functional design, without ornaments and
excesses. Once Jobs visited the Xerox research center in Palo Alto, where he saw the design of a
computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse. Then he had the idea to make the control
more intuitive (Apple first gave the user the ability to drag and drop documents and folders on
the virtual desktop). The Xerox mouse had three keys, and it cost $ 300. Jobs ordered a local
industrial designer Dean Hovey a simple one-button model that would cost $ 15. Khovi managed
to do it. Simplicity does not abolish complexity, but conquers it.
Jobs wanted the machine to obey the user, and not frighten him. (Daft, Murphy &
Willmott, 2010). He was striving for deep simplicity and found a soul mate in the person of
Johnny Ive, the industrial designer of Apple (Wolf, 1996). Both understood that the matter was
not just in the minimalist style and getting rid of the disorder. To remove the cogs, buttons or
extra windows, you need to thoroughly understand the role of each element (Panzarino, 2012).
Initially, there was a window where the user chose how to search - by the name of the song,
album or artist. "Why do we need this?" - Jobs asked. The developers agreed that this menu is
superfluous. "It often happened that we were sitting tensely above some problem place in the
interface, and he suddenly said:" Did you think about that? "- says Tony Fadell, head of the iPod