King's Own Institute ICT 275 Report: Apple Inc. Innovation and Tech

This report, prepared for ICT 275 at King's Own Institute, analyzes Apple Inc.'s innovation and technology management. It explores Apple's core business activities, the role of innovation in its success, and its competitive strategies in the market. The report examines Apple's research and development efforts, factors contributing to its innovation success, and categorizes its innovation as disruptive. It also discusses Apple's technology S-curve and how innovation provides a competitive advantage. The report concludes with recommendations for Apple, emphasizing the importance of customer-centricity and pricing strategies. The report leverages information from various sources to provide a comprehensive overview of Apple's innovation journey.

Running Head: ICT 275
ICT 275 Innovation and Technology Management
Name of the Student
Name of the University

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Executive Summary
Apple Inc. is a company that mainly innovates, manufactures and sells computing devices like
smartphones, laptops, smart watches and others. The selection of Apple as the case study is
suitable because of the commercial success it has achieved using innovation as one of the tools.
This report focuses on the discussion regarding the innovation at Apple including how it used
innovation as a driving factor behind its commercial success.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Core Business Activity and Role of Innovation..............................................................................3
Innovation in Business and Competition in Market........................................................................4
Research and Development in Organisation’s Innovation..............................................................5
Factors behind Firm’s Innovation Success......................................................................................6
Firm’s Innovation Category.............................................................................................................6
Firm’s Technology S-Curve............................................................................................................7
Innovation as Advantage.................................................................................................................9
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
Recommendations..........................................................................................................................10
References......................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Apple Inc. is one of the largest commercial brand in the world that manufactures various
smart devices like phones, laptops, pad and others. Some of the most popular devices sold by the
company include the iPhone, Mac Book, iPad, iPod and others. The company, under the
leadership of the late Steve Jobs, had taken innovation in the smart devices industry to an
entirely new level far ahead of its nearest competitors, resulting in huge global popularity of the
devices (Heracleous and Papachroni 2016). In spite of high pricing of the devices sold by the
company that are often out of range of mid and lower end customers, the devices have
successfully gone through millions of sales worldwide, generating huge amount of revenue for
the company. With ahead of time innovations and high quality devices, Apple has easily become
the most commercially successful smart device manufacturer and seller of all time.
This report focuses on the innovation strategies used by Apple Inc. and how innovation
has helped the company to grow into a global brand.
Core Business Activity and Role of Innovation
Apple Inc. authority has always been passionate about exploiting the benefits of
technology and from the start has promoted research on ground breaking technology that will
revolutionise the industry. When Apple iPhone was first released in the market, smartphones
were already much popular and companies like Samsung, Nokia, Lenovo and others already had
major shares in the market. However, with the much ahead of time technology utilised by Apple,
the iPhone devices became instant hit (Dolata 2017). Naturally, the iPhones are the most popular
products of Apple since its inception till now. The company also manufactures other products

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like laptops (Mac Book), iPad, Apple TV, Apply Watch and many others. All of the products are
equipped with the latest technologies and have premium prices but are highly popular among
high end customers and corporate sectors. In addition to the research, development and
manufacturing of these devices, Apple also invests significant amount of funds in software
development – mainly the Mac OS. Furthermore, Apple has already started considerable research
in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Innovation has played the most significant role in the growth and popularity of Apple.
This company, from the start, has been dependant on ground breaking innovations that have
revolutionised the smart devices market. While most of the smartphone and other smart devices
company rely mostly on marketing strategies for increasing sales, Apple has solely relied on
innovation for growth and popularity (Grundy, Wang and Bero 2016). Late Steve Jobs, who was
the co-founder of Apple back in 1976, had always emphasised on the importance of innovation
and had ensured the company always worked on quality instead of quantity to attract the
customers. That is why, even though the costs of Apple products are significantly high, the
popularity of the company has never dwindled from the peak of the smart devices market.
Innovation in Business and Competition in Market
In addition to innovation of the products, Apple has also done a commendable job in
innovating new business strategies and integrating them with their products and services. For
instance, the introduction of Apple Play Store and iTunes and their free subscriptions with
purchase of devices strongly boosted the sales of smart devices like iPhone and iPod
(Rujanavech et al. 2016). The innovative strategies behind the development of Play Store (the

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largest collection of mobile apps and games for iPhone) and iTunes (largest collection of songs
for iPod, iPhone and iPad) played a major role in boosting the sales of the devices.
In the 21st century, when the iPhone was first launched, there was significant amount of
competition in the market, mostly because smartphone giants like Nokia, Samsung and others
already had strong presence in the market with millions of customers worldwide. However,
competition in the market was never a problem for Apple. Unique marketing strategies and
innovative devices with ground breaking technologies enabled Apple to get hold of the market
easily and rapidly gain a major share of the market.
Research and Development in Organisation’s Innovation
Research and development has been the most important department of Apple having
developed ground breaking technologies for the smart devices like smartphones. As discussed
above, when the iPhone was first released, the company already faced strong competition from
the corporate giants like Samsung who already had the majority of shares in the market. Apple
management understand that only with marketing, the market shares cannot be earned. Hence,
they focussed on innovation that helped them to make their devices completely different from the
others in the market in terms of technology and innovation. Not only they were different but also
they were technically much superior as well as ahead of time that garnered the interests of the
customers (Khan, Alam and Alam 2015). While due to the use of advanced and expensive
technologies, the prices of the devices were premium and were targeted towards the high end
customers only, the research and development team ensured that the devices were equipped with
highly advanced technology that was not previously available in any other devices. As a result,
soon after the release of the devices, Apple experienced huge amount of sales that were even past

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their expectations, making them a billionaire company in literally no time. Hence, research and
development played the role that is generally played by the marketing department of other
business organisations.
Factors behind Firm’s Innovation Success
The firm’s innovation success has been affected by the following factors.
 Ground breaking and ahead of time technology not previously seen by customers.
 Premium features and services that the other competitors cannot offer or can offer
in limited capacity.
 Development of brand value over time.
Firm’s Innovation Category
The innovation category of any firm is determined using the innovation matrix using the
two axes as problem definition and domain definition. The innovation matrix is shown below.

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Figure 1: Innovation Matrix
(Source: Khan, Alam and Alam 2015, pp.955)
For the case of Apple, for the problem definition axes, it can be said that the innovation
had not solved any pre-existing problem or defined any problem with the other similar products.
The products are developed by the company on their own that do not aim to define any problem,
they are simply devices with unique features not seen in other popular devices in the market
(Von Lohmann 2017). However, the domain of the innovation for Apple is very much well
defined as the company ensures developments that are specific to their operational domain.
Hence, the innovation of Apple can be categorised as disruptive innovation.

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Firm’s Technology S-Curve
Technology S-curve is a graphical representation of the performance / maturity of a
technology in a timeline starting from its inception to current time as shown below.
Figure 2: Technology S-Curve
(Source: Khan, Alam and Alam 2015, pp.957)
It is seen from this diagram that the technology s-curve consists of four major stages of
life cycle – embryonic, growth, mature and aging. Embryonic stage is the time when the
innovation is at a very early stage and is under development mostly. Aging is the stage when the
innovation is extremely old and there is no further scope of upgrades or development.
Considering the trends of innovation at Apple Inc., it can be said that the current stage of

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innovation of the company in the technology s-curve is mature. The company is way past the
embryonic stage and the growth stage has been past in the last one and a half decade. Currently,
the innovation of the company is in a more stable position and new features and devices are
rolled out at a slower pace but also a bit more customer centric than before unlike the growth
phase.
Innovation as Advantage
Innovation is one of the major drivers behind most successful businesses but not all
business organisations are able to utilise the benefits of innovation in a similar manner. For
some, frequent innovation is costly and out of budget whereas for some others, innovation is
unnecessary and they just copy technology and features from other competitors already sharing
the market (Heracleous and Papachroni 2016). However, Apple used innovation as advantage
and used it to earn its way into the smart devices market. As already discussed in the report, the
innovation of Apple ensured the development of technology that was not seen earlier even with
all the smart devices available in the market and Apple used this technique to earn customers in a
highly competitive market.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that unique marketing strategies and innovative devices with ground
breaking technologies enabled Apple to get hold of the market easily and rapidly gain a major
share of the market. Apple used innovation as advantage and used it to earn its way into the
smart devices market. While Apple has now become a much more mature company, it can be

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said that the company will continue to innovate new features and technology that will further
increase its demand in the market.
Recommendations
Based on the study of the company’s innovation, the following recommendations can be
made.
The company must focus on the pricing of the products as there are some new entrants in
the market that are providing high end features at extremely low prices. Currently, Apple relies
on its brand value in order to out sale other competitors but this is not a sustainable technique
and the market will not be favourable in the next few years.
The company needs to focus more on customer requirements rather than innovating on
their own.

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References
Dolata, U., 2017. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft: Market concentration-
competition-innovation strategies (No. 2017-01). Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Organisations-und
Innovationsforschung, SOI Discussion Paper.
Grundy, Q.H., Wang, Z. and Bero, L.A., 2016. Challenges in assessing mobile health app
quality: a systematic review of prevalent and innovative methods. American journal of
preventive medicine, 51(6), pp.1051-1059.
Heracleous, L. and Papachroni, A., 2016. Strategic Leadership and Innovation at Apple Inc.
SAGE Publications Ltd.
Khan, U.A., Alam, M.N. and Alam, S., 2015. A critical analysis of internal and external
environment of Apple Inc. International Journal of Economics, Commerce and
Management, 3(6), pp.955-961.
Rujanavech, C., Lessard, J., Chandler, S., Shannon, S., Dahmus, J. and Guzzo, R., 2016. Liam-an
innovation story. Apple.
Von Lohmann, F., 2017. Fair use as innovation policy. In Copyright Law (pp. 169-205).
Routledge.