Technology and Innovation

Blog # 3

It will be cliché to talk about, but one of the truly most innovative products that have come out in the past few years is the iPhone. According to your lecture slides creativity “is an idea that is both ‘useful’ and ‘novel’”. The iPhone embraces both of these ideas of creativity. Let’s first explore the “useful” component of the creativity of the iPhone. The iPhone includes every type of communication in one device except for old fashioned letter writing. On this one device you can make phone calls, check email, tweet on twitter, and make Facebook posts. It is so useful to have one device to keep in touch with the world with all of these different mediums of communication. What differentiates the iPhone from Blackberries and other smart phones is the novelty of its application programs. No other phone has the vast array of “apps” that the iPhone has. You can download an application for just about anything you can imagine, and if the iPhone does not have the application you want, iPhone allows users to program applications and submit them for other users to download and use. The iPhone is also very innovative, which according to the class slides is, “applied creativity”. Apple applied creativity to its touch screen interface and made it one of the easiest to use in the phone business. The ease of use of the touch screen and the user centered feel that the iPhone focuses on makes it the most innovative and creative phone on the market today.
The article “The New, Faster Face of Innovation” discusses how technology has allowed companies implement new ideas quickly across the company. Technology, the article states, is rapidly leading to innovations across the business world. I worked for a skin care company where I saw evidence of this throughout this past summer. The article states, “…technology also lets companies easily scale those ideas – or implement them rapidly and cheaply throughout the whole business.” Skin Laboratory, the company I for which I worked, came out with a new product this summer and wanted to promote it. We sent out a coupon code to our mailing list of past customers that allowed them to obtain a free sample of the new product if they entered in a code on our company website when making another purchase of one of our products. We were able to see the effects of the promotion immediately because the number of codes entered were recorded in a computer data base. Being a web based company allowed us to test the idea of free sample right away, and we were able to see the effects of it right away because of technology.