Iterative Innovation vs Carte Blanche Innovation

Some thing on my mind: the difference between iterative innovation and carte blanche, totally new innovation from scratch.

Short Apple?

I keep getting this nagging feeling at the back of my mind, that Apple is on the way out. That Steve Jobs’ creative vision for the company, and his ethos of innovation is slowly dying. It seems that nowadays, the focus at Apple with Tim Cook is profits above innovation. That the purpose of Apple isn’t to innovate, but to maximize profits. That innovating new products is only for the sake of maximizing profits, rather than the sake of profits used for innovation.

For example, now that Jony Ive has left, all of the new Apple products, are either a bit lame, tacky, bizarre, or even ugly. That the new Apple products have very strange colors, ugly finishes, and I assume that if Jony Ive were still at Apple, Jony would not let these products be created or released.

For example, nobody likes the color blue, especially for Apple devices.

Also it seems that the trend is to just take old pre-existing Apple products, and just changing the processors inside. Old products with new guts is the strategy, rather than using their war chest in order to create a totally brand new products from scratch.

Iterative

Certainly iterative innovation is a good thing. If we think about the Japanese kaizen model, or the Toyota strategy, it is to just simply continue iterating things to make them slightly more perfect, indefinitely.

For example, you cannot get a six pack overnight, and also, you cannot go from dead lifting 135 pounds to 475 pounds overnight. If you could increase your one rep max for your dead lift, 3% week over week, this is the only practical way to do it. One cannot increase their dead lift strength by 1000% overnight. Therefore from a biological perspective, iteration and strength building is iterative, not carte blanche.

Carte blanche innovation

The enemy of carte blanche innovation is the desire for profits, or the desire to make a bunch of money. In fact, I think the purpose of carte blanche innovation is more of a personal curiosity and a passion rather than anything else. I actually think that the purpose of life in general is to attempt insanely audacious innovations, rather than slavishly follow what has worked in the past. For example, my insane optimism with Elon musk and Tesla: imagining the electric car future. Or even what Kanye West has done with music, fashion, and creativity.

My personal passion and desire is to do to photography what Steve Jobs did with computing. I want to innovate the world of photography, our approach to photography, and our philosophy to photography.