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Apple is the most valuable company in capitalism's history. Yet, it has often been declared dead or irrelevant more than any other organisation. Understanding how Apple has consistently innovated is a key lesson in innovation strategy.
Most organisations that struggle with innovation are not short of ideas. They are short of direction. There is no shortage of enthusiasm for new possibilities, no absence of creative people willing to imagine different futures. What is missing is a clear answer to a deceptively simple question.
What kind of innovation are we actually trying to achieve, and why?
There is a romantic version of innovation that many of us carry around with us. In this version, a brilliant individual has a flash of insight in the shower, or a small team works obsessively in a garage, and something transformative emerges. The idea arrives. The world changes.
It makes for a great story. And occasionally, it's even true.
Following on from the recent blog series on Entrepreneurship, here's a new topic to explore.
Introducing a blog series on one of the most important yet misunderstood ideas in business: Innovation.
If you've spent time in business, technology, or politics, you've likely heard the word Innovation. It’s everywhere. On company websites, in university brochures, and in government plans. It has become so common that its meaning is fading. Everyone seems to be doing, funding, or claiming to lead it.
Most entrepreneurs focus intensely on starting and growing their ventures while giving little thought to how they'll eventually leave them. This oversight is understandable. When you're fighting for survival or managing rapid growth, planning your exit feels premature or even defeatist. But thinking about exit strategies from the beginning isn't pessimistic planning for failure. It's strategic preparation for success.
In the early 1990s, Sony was known for its Walkmans, televisions, and music. Gaming? That was Nintendo's world. Yet within this electronics giant, an engineer named Ken Kutaragi was quietly defying his superiors. He worked on a project that would transform Sony. He succeeded in revolutionising an entire industry. Over three decades, he generated over $500 billion in revenue.
Entrepreneurship isn't confined to startups launched in garages or ventures funded by venture capital. Some of the most impactful innovations occur within established organisations. They’re driven by employees who think and act like entrepreneurs while working within corporate structures. This phenomenon is variously referred to as intrapreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, or corporate venturing. It represents a powerful yet often misunderstood path.
In a world dominated by single-purpose applications: one for messaging, another for payments, a third for social networking, one app defied convention to become something unprecedented. WeChat became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users.
Mobile applications have fundamentally changed entrepreneurship. What once required significant capital, infrastructure, and technical teams can now be built by small teams or even solo founders with relatively modest resources. The smartphone in your pocket represents a direct connection to billions of potential customers, a powerful computing platform, and access to services and APIs that would have cost millions to build a decade ago.
In 1954, Ray Kroc visited the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino to see why they were making so many milkshakes. The 52-year-old milkshake mixer salesman had spent decades in various sales jobs, never quite finding his breakthrough. What he witnessed that day would change his life and revolutionise the restaurant industry. A streamlined hamburger stand serving customers with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
In 1976, while walking through the village of Jobra in Bangladesh, economics professor Muhammad Yunus encountered a woman named Sophia Begum weaving bamboo stools. Despite her skill and hard work, she earned barely two cents per day. The reason was simple yet devastating: she lacked the twenty cents needed to buy bamboo from the market. Instead, she borrowed from local moneylenders who charged predatory interest rates, so that her entire profit went toward servicing debt. She was trapped in a cycle of poverty, not because she lacked ability or work ethic, but because she lacked access to affordable credit.
For decades, business and social impact occupied separate spheres. Businesses existed to maximise profit. Charities and nonprofits addressed social problems. The assumption was that these objectives were fundamentally incompatible. Pursuing profit meant sacrificing social good, while prioritising social impact required abandoning commercial viability.
Success in entrepreneurship often creates an unexpected problem: growth itself becomes the challenge. What worked brilliantly at 5 employees breaks catastrophically at 50. Processes that seemed unnecessary become essential. Many entrepreneurs discover that scaling a business requires fundamentally different skills from starting one.
Having discussed Accelerators in a previous post, here’s a detailed exploration of Incubators and how they support entrepreneurs.
When entrepreneurs first conceive of a business idea, they often face a daunting challenge: how to transform a concept into a functioning company. While accelerators help existing startups grow faster, incubators serve a fundamentally different purpose. They help nascent ideas develop into viable businesses. Think of incubators as the greenhouse where seeds are carefully nurtured, while accelerators are the Baby Bio applied to young plants that need to scale quickly.
Many entrepreneurs excel at product development, sales, or operations, but struggle with financial management. This is dangerous. Poor financial management kills more startups than bad products do. Running out of money, failing to understand unit economics, or making decisions based on gut feel rather than data can destroy an otherwise promising venture.
Following from a previous post on entrepreneurial ecosystems, here’s a deeper dive into the topic of Accelerators. They compress years of learning into months and dramatically increase the chances of entrepreneurial success.
Raising capital is one of the most misunderstood aspects of entrepreneurship. Popular media focuses on massive venture capital rounds and dramatic pitch competitions. It creates the impression that external funding is both necessary and universally available. The reality is far more nuanced. Most businesses never raise institutional capital, and many that do raise the wrong amount at the wrong time. Some of the most successful companies were built with minimal external funding.
Not every story of entrepreneurial culture is the same. Here’s a nice example, which is a very different one from the Pixar story - Toyota
