Increasingly, successful products all have a new must-have feature, and that is “beauty”. I don’t know if you’ve recognized it yet, but everyone seems to be extolling the virtues of their “beautiful” design lately, and I know that personally, when I’m choosing software, for example, I always want to see what it looks like before I’ll be bothered to download.
For every successful product Apple releases, there have been multiple major failures.
A large number of companies have made very good businesses out of doing incremental, rather than radical innovation.
In the past, organizations tried to win by controlling as many physical resources as they could. They wanted factories, and financial control and distribution. “Buy more widgets” they screamed at consumers, as they tried to outdo each other in efficiently producing products and service in a race to ultimate commoditization of everything.
The idea that innovation is speculative and risky is usually a sign that a company has experienced significant innovation trauma in the past.