Disciplined Innovation

This week's BusinessWeek includes one of their occasional sections on innovation. It contains a terrific article on Apple's senior vice president for industrial design Jonathan Ive, who leads the design teams that created such iconic products as the original candy-colored iMac, the iPod and the flat-screen iMac G5.

It's characteristic of Apple's closed-mouth culture that Ive refused to speak directly to BW for the article. Clearly, Apple manages information like money --  take note, HP. Despite his official silence, quotes from former colleagues and Ive's own comments taken from industry events and other venues offer a fascinating look into how Apple goes about designing and producing its products.

BW also highlights observations by Ive on how Apple has achieved and maintained a high level of design excellence and, just as important, customer acceptance:

"If you are going to design something that's going to be truly innovative, my experience has been that this will require the company that's going to make it to change -- often to change fundamentally -- in its approach to how it develops products, how it evaluates them, how it makes them, and how it markets them."

"We try very genuinely to design products that solve problems. They are not about self-expression. What we are trying to do is design something that when you see it, you really wonder if it's been designed at all, because it seems so obvious and so inevitable and so simple."

"We don't make very much stuff. That's a very important part of our approach to what we do, which is to not do a lot of unnecessary stuff but just to focus and really try very sincerely to care so much about the few things that we do."

"I think one of the things we are good at as a team is gently moving these fragile ideas along a bit so they become just a little more robust, and you can actually start to see what they are. So we go from those sorts of discussions and then we just make lots and lots of prototypes. Then we spend a lot of time at the manufacturing sites. We'll be there right to the end when we're in production."

The common theme is one word: Discipline. A disciplined approach to innovation, not wild-and-crazy brainstorming, seems to set Apple's design process apart. For someone like me, who sometimes gets carried away with creating ideas, it's an important lesson -- an object lesson, if you will. The proof is in the products.

Innovation is always a challenge. Here are some articles that apply to the workplace and to your own personal career innovations:

• "The Battle to Recruit Intellectual Capital"
• "Become an Expert at Something"
• Consultant Nicholas Carr on "The Prudent Innovator"
• "Entrepreneurial Employees: Good or Bad?"
• "Penetrating the Corporate Immune System"

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