Describe about the Challenges in Implementing Innovation Project for Management Scholars.
Innovation has become one of the key aspects of business in the last few decades. From the point of view of the most management scholars’ innovation is one of the tools that have given top most multinational companies competitive advantage in the market and hence in the recent years innovation management has become one of the most spoken words from the parlance of business management. The managers from all around the world has emphasised highly on innovation on products and services which would allow the company to gain to competitive advantage in the market successfully (Manyika et al., 2011). In this scenario companies have faced certain situations which initially they were not prepared for and hence faced serious challenges in the market. These challenge the capability to innovate which has affected business of multinational companies due to the tremendous rivalry in the market and one such company is Apple Inc. Apple is considered as a behemoth in the global IT industry and the over the years the company has produced excellent quality IT products right from the McIntosh Computers to IPods and then the legacy of iPhones the company has done it all (Drucker, 2014).
Apple is considered as one of the most creative companies which have brought number of new technologies on the table for the consumers with its products which have helped the company to have huge market share in the global IT market. In the recent past the company has faced number of problems regarding innovation which puts the company in immense pressure due to the emergence of companies like Samsung, Microsoft, HTC et cetera. The rationale of the present study lies in the fact that in the recent past Apple had serious problems with implementation of innovation on iPhones which has pushed the company in back foot. Hence the present study will discuss the key problems of innovation that the company has faced while its project of latest iPhone was under process (Chesbrough, 2010). It will not only discuss the challenges faced by the company in terms of innovation but will also suggest effective strategies that could possibly help the company to come out of the innovation problem.
For a long period of time Apple Inc has been competing in the market with the likes of Samsung, Microsoft and other mobile companies at ease but with the time passing by and Samsung with its latest technology and sleek style have been able to outplay Apple in some of the important markets that have questioned the innovative ability of Apple Inc. In the international arena there has been a buzz that Apple doesn’t have anything new up its sleeve to offer the consumers and this has provided strong competitive advantage to companies like Microsoft and Samsung. There has been number of significant discussions by management scholars and innovation experts who have tried to identify the exact problem of the company and all of them has almost got similar result which revolves around innovation which means the real problem that the company has had in the recent past is innovation in its products (Jaffe & Lerner, 2011).
For the most IT companies nowadays it is extremely important to understand that essentiality of innovation and Apple has been consistently doing that before it got stuck with its latest iPhone that is iPhone 7. Every time Apple has come up with a product it has been something which has attracted the consumers but presently as per top management gurus Apple is nothing a but an exclusive brand which has an excellent brand image and that’s what exactly pulling sales for the company. Apple has always strived to implement the best possible approach to innovation which involves resources, time and finance but the company hasn’t been able to implement innovation process in the latest development of iPhone. It is a fact now in the technology industry that innovation has become quite stagnant for Apple as an organisation which has always strived to bring out the best from the latest technology (Sapprasert & Clausen, 2012).
The history says it all, that over the years people have supported innovation in IT very generously as they have got the taste of latest technology through these devices. The innovation problem in Apple has seriously taken the driver’s seat in the age of disruptive technology trend. In the last few years in fact to say after the death of the company’s visionary leader Steve Jobs the company Apple has not been able to capitalise on the innovative capability it has. The top management professionals in the current market have stated that the last big thing that Apple did was the launch of iPhone and then eventually nothing big really happened for the company. It somehow got stagnated with its innovative ideas or is it that the company really doesn’t have anything to innovate. This could be clearly understood by the innovation project implemented for its latest product that is iPhone 7 (Horibe, 2016).
In the last few years Apple has been severely criticised for its not so valuable creativity that have been implemented in its iPhone models and the legacy continued with the launch of iPhone 6 and 6s which the company thought would lay the path for the launch of iPhone 7, but something changed drastically as the company lost significant market share due to the failure of innovation in its mobile phone models. The last few editions of iPhone have seen nothing new conspicuously and this puts a huge question mark on the innovation capability of the company. The launch of the iPhone 6 comes as another mid life iPhone face lift which is definitely not going serve the purpose of capturing the market very easily (Naranjo-Valencia et al., 2011).
The looks of the phones remain the same and even here there are no high surprises that hinder the growth of its market. The live photo concept in the device could be considered as the cross between the work that Vine and Google have been doing for a little while now so nothing rings the bell even in this segment. With the increasing market competition Apple has somehow succumbed to the pressure as its iPhone 6s also had nothing new and is pretty similar to iPad mini which is definitely going to affect the market of the later. In this scenario the iPhone 7 had been planned to salvage pride and resurrect the lost faith of the customers on Apple (Davenport, 2013). The Innovation project of iPhone 7 had number of challenges that Apple will have to try to eliminate in its upcoming projects. Since the launch of iPad in 2010 the company did not come up with something which has the ability to shift the graph of the market towards the company and this has been one main reason for the huge failure of the company in the recent past. Hence it is important to mention the key challenges that the company had to face while implementing innovation project on Apple iPhone 7 (Horibe, 2016).
From the parlance of management innovation will be effective if the employees in the company are effective which clearly means that the intellectual capital in an organisation is the key to success of innovation project. After the death of Steve Jobs and then the launch of latest iPhones and iWatch people are starting to get a clear view about the movement of Apple in terms of innovation. As stated earlier that for innovation to succeed it is important to implement creativity and this is what seems to be the main challenge for the company (Davenport, 2013).
Creativity is something which helps to get the best possible result out of an idea. It seems that that the main challenge for Apple to implement innovation is their creativity problem. It seems the company has been pushed back to the wall in terms of creativity and now it is not able to compete with companies like Samsung who seems to be doing pretty well in the market. In the last few editions of iPhones Apple have been very particular about the investment of creativity. It seems that the company has invested ultimate intellectual firepower in its editions of iPhones and hardly has anything new to offer to the consumers. This has happened as the company has not been able to change the look of the phones and they are similar to the previous editions except the screen size which mainly comes with bigger screens. Hence it could be said that the employees in the research and development has not been able to come up with ample creative ideas which stands to be the challenge for the company to change (Block & Keller, 2015).
The approach to systematic innovation is one of the major problems that the company had to face with the launch of iPhone. Due to the untimely death of Steve Jobs the company had to shift from the revolutionary thinking to systematic thinking and this is where the problem lies. It’s because now the consumers have received more than they could imagine but systematic thinking wouldn’t allow the innovation approach to move faster and this will reduce the innovation procedure which will definitely affect the innovation in the company. The development and launch of iPhones and their specifications have already been experienced by iPad a user which kind of makes the innovation very dull (Gember-Jacobson et al., 2015).
Technology has been another problem for the company. Technological innovation is the most important innovation for a mobile phone company. Apple as an organisation has been able to manage its technology in a chronological manner but with iPhones being launched with the same style and format there has hardly been technological innovation and this is where Samsung has been able to capitalise on the market. For example Apple should develop upgrade the technology used in iOS as Android is moving very fast from Lollypop to Marshmallow and so on but Apple has somehow got stagnated in the development of its iOS. Alongside this iOS update procedure has been clearly a mess for the company and hence it will have to address this issue very soon as iPhone 7 users have suffered this problem as well. The recent problem of iOS 8.0.1update that affected havoc on the iPhone 6 users has dented the confidence of the consumers on Apple devices (Sundbo, 2015).
The financial aspect of innovation in the project lifecycle is another key aspect that the company should focus on. After the death of Jobs company had reduced to invest more on innovation and has had a stipulated budget of $1billion which is not likely to help the company as they would need more of that in order to streamline the process of innovation and the biggest challenge for the company to take that risk. Hence it could be said that financial risk was also a challenge for the company for the company (Wu et al., 2015).
From the above discussion it is very clear that the company hardly has a strong strategic framework for innovation and is aiming to ride on its brand image and goodwill to capture the market. Hence the first recommendation to overcome this problem would be to have a strong innovation framework which will involve discussions of areas which need innovations especially regarding Apple products (Ries, 2011).
Apple is one of the most creative IT companies and hence it should use its creativity to good effect. For that having effective employees and visionary leaders within the organisation is very important. Effective research and development team and training team will have to play a huge role to prepare employees to create, innovate and implement their ideas in their respective jobs which will help to manage innovation effectively (Horibe, 2016).
There are number of Technology companies who have shifted to Disruptive technology by the company is the best way to sweep the market off the feet. The disruptive technology is the latest trend and the company should capitalise more on it to develop the market. Innovation in that case will be more interesting and ideal for generation y consumers (Teece, 2010).
Strong and efficient financial planning is important for the innovation project to be successful on a particular project. Similar to iPhone 6, 6s and 7 if the company comes up some new device it should have a proper innovation done on it which is only possible if creativity, intellectual property and financial resources are put together which will only happen if the company has effective financial planning done for the innovation framework (Goldberg, 2013).
Conclusion
Apple’s innovation problem regarding iPhone is real which directly indicates the company’s inability to properly innovate and improve its products and hence it is important for the company to apply different strategies and hiring and channelising creative intellect. On the other hand it is also important that the company is able to utilise its financial resources effectively in order to ensure success in its innovation project (Gassmann et al., 2010). The present study has been successful in discussing the different aspects of innovation and how to improve innovation in a company which has helped to cover up the objectives of the study.
References
Block, F.L. and Keller, M.R., 2015. State of innovation: The US government’s role in technology development. Routledge.
Chesbrough, H., 2010. Business model innovation: opportunities and barriers. Long range planning, 43(2), pp.354-363
Davenport, T.H., 2013. Process innovation: reengineering work through information technology. Harvard Business Press.
Drucker, P., 2014. Innovation and entrepreneurship. Routledge.
Gassmann, O., Enkel, E. and Chesbrough, H., 2010. The future of open innovation. R&d Management, 40(3), pp.213-221.
Gember-Jacobson, A., Viswanathan, R., Prakash, C., Grandl, R., Khalid, J., Das, S. and Akella, A., 2015. OpenNF: Enabling innovation in network function control. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 44(4), pp.163-174.
Goldberg, D.E., 2013. The design of innovation: Lessons from and for competent genetic algorithms (Vol. 7). Springer Science & Business Media.
Horibe, F., 2016. Creating the innovation culture: Leveraging visionaries, dissenters, and other useful troublemakers in your organization. VisionArts Inc.
Jaffe, A.B. and Lerner, J., 2011. Innovation and its discontents: How our broken patent system is endangering innovation and progress, and what to do about it. Princeton University Press.
Manyika, J., Chui, M., Brown, B., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C. and Byers, A.H., 2011. Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.
Naranjo-Valencia, J.C., Jiménez-Jiménez, D. and Sanz-Valle, R., 2011. Innovation or imitation? The role of organizational culture. Management Decision, 49(1), pp.55-72.
Ries, E., 2011. The lean startup: How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Crown Books.
Sapprasert, K. and Clausen, T.H., 2012. Organizational innovation and its effects. Industrial and Corporate Change, 21(5), pp.1283-1305.
Sundbo, J., 2015. Theory of innovation. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science.
Teece, D.J., 2010. Business models, business strategy and innovation. Long range planning, 43(2), pp.172-194.
Wu, D., Rosen, D.W., Wang, L. and Schaefer, D., 2015. Cloud-based design and manufacturing: A new paradigm in digital manufacturing and design innovation. Computer-Aided Design, 59, pp.1-14.
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