Ken Cooper | Teaching Innovation.

Apple is the latest company to execute what I like to call the "Little Dutch Boy" approach to CSR strategy. The apocryphal Dutch legend tells of a boy who, upon seeing a trickle of sea water coming through a hole in a dyke, pokes his finger in to stem the flow.

Many companies have taken a similar approach to CSR. Instead of acknowledging...

The innovator's quest has been to find the win-win proposition: a great new product that can create differentiated value for consumers while supporting differentiated profits for the producer.

But the focus on win-win can blind us to the needs of critical partners. When success depends on others — suppliers, complementors, distributors, retailers — satisfying end consumers is not enough. The innovator's job is now to create wins across the board. Win-lose-win is a...

The 8 million iPhones that Apple sold in China last quarter are a lot like exotic pets: They're cute and they make great gifts for rich young men to give to their girlfriends, but outside of their native ecosystem, their survival prospects don't look very good.

The unexpected sales boom in China (8 million is my rough estimate) went a long way toward offsetting the company's less-than-robust performance in the U.S. market and helps explain Apple's record-breaking...

The idea that customers can't or shouldn't participate much in the innovation process is one barrier to creativity that companies are rapidly knocking down. Many firms are rethinking their businesses, envisioning themselves less as providers of internally-created products and services, and more as platforms that allow customers to create their own experience and value. This new view and way of operating actually helps companies come closer to achieving the ideal of giving customers...

A few weeks before Steve Jobs passed away, I was at Apple having lunch with a leader there. We revisited the well-known story of Jobs returning to an almost-bankrupt Apple. Jobs could have tried to maximize profits by squeezing every cent out of each of the existing product lines. But instead, he led the charge to remove scores of products. (At the time, Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh alone.) Jobs cut out profitable business lines at a time when the company appeared it could...

When a consumer product company wants to know how a new product or new marketing campaign will perform, it doesn't rely solely on traditional market research surveys. It goes to test markets. It's the right way to discover how the innovation will go over in real market conditions, without the risk of a national or global rollout. It also provides the test bed for optimizing the marketing mix to support the full-scale launch. Actual market experience, veteran marketers will tell you...

If you want to create a really transformational innovation, you'd better be in an organization that's designed to support, not merely tolerate, someone as challenging as Steve Jobs. Otherwise forget it.

"No Simon," I know many of you are thinking, "that's not how it works these days: Innovation is all about flat structures, empathy, co-creation..." — you know the stuff.

But are you sure? Collegiality may make the process more pleasant and more fun, but that's...

I recently returned from a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida. There, my son noticed the manhole cover. Right in the center is Mickey Mouse. On the manhole cover! Although my son noticed it, not everyone does. And that's the point.

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The most viable rival to Apple's iPad isn't produced by a traditional hardware firm. Samsung, Motorola, Toshiba, HP, RIM and HTC have hardly made a dent in Apple's dominance. Remarkably, the leading challenger is online retailer Amazon, with its Kindle Fire tablet.

The innovation game is changing. Delivering great products is no longer sufficient for success. And as the Fire's limited memory, ho-hum processor, and and lack of camera demonstrate, great products may not even be...

I believe that Steve Jobs was among the best CEOs of this generation because he created entirely new categories six times in a decade, and built the largest company market cap ever. Yet two recent and excellent books (Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky and ...