Apple has become synonymous with product innovation. We have a number of clients in the life sciences, in healthcare, and even in public health who say they aspire to be like Apple. What they really mean is they want to make very hip, cutting-edge, trend-setting products. They want customers with cult-like devotion. And they want to score major "cool points" -- lots of 'em. All while making a ton of money.

Which is a problem. Why? It reminds me of a large, national, nonprofit we work with that said they want to be world class. The question was, are they willing to pay the price of being world class? Like letting go of mediocre employees, investing in top training programs, rewarding high performance, etc. 

Similarly, companies that want to establish a value discipline of innovation need to be willing to pay the price. In the development phase alone, Apple makes a huge investment. For example:

• A small team of extremely well-paid, top-notch designers with a maniacal focus on perfection.
• Who create 10 perfect mock-ups for each potential new product feature, from which three mock-ups will be selected for further exploration, to result in the feature in as perfect a form as possible.
• Which means Apple knows in advance that they will get rid of 90% (9 of 10 mock-ups) of what they create.
• And happily makes that investment.
• Fueled by leadership that is relentlessly committed to winning by innovating.

Which results in game-changing, industry-inventing, highly profitable products with incredible demand.

And Apple's style of innovation invite a fundamental re-positioning of form and function. As Alain Briellat put it in his excellent analysis:

"Apple doesn’t sell functional products; they sell fashionable pieces of functional art."

So... two simple questions for you, dear reader:

1) What do you sell?

2) Are you willing to invest what it takes to be a top innovator in your space?

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P.S. Check out these classics: Peter Drucker on The Discipline of Innovation, and Treacy & Wiersema on Value Disciplines.

No, I don't mean MTV's award-winning series on musicians performing with acoustic (i.e. unplugged) instruments. I mean unplugging and taking a break from our cell phones, our texting, our computers, our iPads, our tweets, and of course our Facebook. And yes, blogging. (Which - good news - will make you feel, well, groovy, according to my friends Paul and Art!).

As a society, we have without awareness slipped into a new social norm; one with expectations of always being “on," instantly accessible, having your whereabouts and activities known to all, and finding out anything and everything immediately. Underneath it all is our dubious societal addiction to instant gratification.

Most marketers feed the notion that instant gratification is a good thing. We promise faster and faster, which we imply is better and better. There is however longstanding research that proves otherwise. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the classic Stanford Marshmallow study:

To test the theory of a person’s ability to delay gratification, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (1972), conducted by Prof. Walter Mischel, at Stanford University, California, studied a group of four-year-old children, each of whom was given one marshmallow, but promised two on condition that he or she wait twenty minutes, before eating the first marshmallow. Some children were able to wait the twenty minutes, and some were unable to wait. Furthermore, the university researchers then studied the developmental progress of each participant child into adolescence, and reported that children able to delay gratification (wait) were psychologically better adjusted, more dependable persons, and, as high school students, scored significantly greater grades in the collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Delaying gratification as a four year old is linked with happiness and better grades ten years later... amazing!

Can you pitch delayed gratification or slowing down as a good thing that results from your product or service? If so, think "benefits segmentation." Determine what segment of your market would value or perceive benefit from unplugging. It may be way more folks than you think!

P.S. Check out the new nonprofit Sabbath Manifesto and their 10 Principles. They have an app (no irony here) too to support people unplugging. And it is purely a happy coincidence that the first National Day of Unplugging started on my birthday!

Have you noticed how more and more technology is "hands-on?" Touch screens are everywhere- on phones, ATMS, airport terminals- all kinds of computers. When Apple brought out the iPad, I didn't think it met a felt need. But I was only thinking about what what it did, not how it did it. I believe the iPad has caught fire because, like its smaller predecessor (the iTouch), how it works is with pointing, touching, swiping - natural intuitive human movements.

The more that interfacing with products and services uses our natural human gestures, movements, and patterns, the better they will sell. Why: They just make sense to us as human beings.

Let's apply this thinking to more complex things- like medical devices and electronic medical records EMRs. The more complex the issue or problem is, the more intuitively simple the interface with the solution needs to be. In our customer research on a wide range of medical products and health issues, we hear it all the time. Keep it simple. And nothing keeps it simpler than products designed to have people to do what they naturally do anyway.