Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love

Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love

苹果的秘密？它告诉我们应该爱什么

by Roberto Verganti JANUARY 28, 2010

罗伯托·维甘蒂2010年1月28日

At the beginning of Steve Jobs’s presentation of the iPad, a slide showed an image of God delivering its commandments, paired by a quote from The Wall Street Journal: “Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it.” Although a touch arrogant, this quote powerfully captures the essence of the event.

在史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）的iPad演示开始时，一张幻灯片显示了上帝传达其诫命的画面，并引用了《华尔街日报》（Wall Street Journal）的一句话：“上次平板电脑如此令人兴奋，它上面写着一些诫命。”尽管有点傲慢，这句话有力地抓住了事件的实质。

While tech experts were busy commenting on the qualities of the iPad, what struck me was the level of excitement that the event created. On Tuesday, the day before the product was unveiled, a Web search for “Apple tablet” produced more than 17 million links! On Wednesday, hordes of people attended the news conference remotely. Everyone was anxiously waiting for Apple’s interpretation of what a tablet is.

当技术专家们忙于评论iPad的质量时，让我印象深刻的是这次活动所带来的兴奋程度。周二，在该产品发布的前一天，对“苹果平板电脑”的网络搜索产生了超过1700万个链接！周三，成群结队的人远程出席了新闻发布会。每个人都在焦急地等待苹果对平板电脑的解释。

This was validation of Apple’s peculiar innovation process: Insights do not move from users to Apple but the other way around. More than Apple listening to us, it’s us who listen to Apple.

这是对苹果独特创新过程的验证：见解不会从用户转移到苹果，而是从而是从另一个角度。不仅仅是苹果听我们的，是我们听苹果的。

This contradicts the conventional management wisdom about innovation. In fact, one of the mantras of the past decade has been user-centered innovation: Companies should start their innovation process by getting close to users and observe them using existing products to understand their needs.

这与关于创新的传统管理智慧相矛盾。事实上，过去十年的格言之一是以用户为中心的创新：企业应该通过接近用户并观察他们使用现有产品来了解他们的需求来开始创新过程。

I disagree with this approach for these kinds of efforts. User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.

我不同意这种做法。以用户为中心的创新是推动增量创新的完美选择，但很难产生突破。事实上，它并没有质疑现有的需求，而是凭借其强大的方法强化了这些需求。

With the iPad Apple has not provided an answer to market needs. It has made a proposal about what could fit us and what we could love. It’s now up to us to answer whether we agree.

有了iPad，苹果并没有提供市场需求的答案。它提出了一个关于什么适合我们，什么我们可以爱的建议。现在由我们来回答我们是否同意。

The iPad, of course, is not the first time Apple has taken this approach. If it had scrutinized users of early MP3 players downloading music from Napster, it would have not came out with a breakthrough system (the iPod + iTunes application + iTunes Store) based on a business model that asks people to pay for music.

当然，iPad并不是苹果第一次采用这种方法。如果它仔细检查了从Napster下载音乐的早期MP3播放器的用户，它就不会基于要求人们付费购买音乐的商业模式推出突破性的系统（iPod+iTunes应用程序+iTunes商店）。

Consumers don’t always swallow Apple’s notion of what they should love. In 2008, when Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, he said “No matter how hard you look, one thing you are not gonna find in a MacBook Air is an optical drive. If you really want one, we have built one. [He showed an external CD-DVD drive] . . . But you know what? We do not think most users will miss the optical drive. We do not think they will need an optical drive.”

消费者并不总是接受苹果关于他们应该爱什么的观念。2008年，当乔布斯推出MacBook Air时，他说“无论你看起来多么努力，有一样东西是你在MacBook Air中找不到的。如果你真的想要一个，我们已经制造了一个。[他展示了一个外部CD-DVD驱动器]……但你知道吗？我们认为大多数用户不会错过光驱。我们认为他们不需要光驱。”

Apple is not alone in thumbing its nose at the notion of user-centered innovation. If Nintendo had closely observed teenagers in their basements using existing game consoles, it would have provided them with what they apparently needed: a powerful console with sophisticated 3D processing that could enable them to better immerse in a virtual world. Instead, Nintendo did not get close to users when developing the Wii. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s senior marketing director, “We don’t use consumer focus groups. We got a lot of feedback from developers in the industry.” This allowed Nintendo to completely redefine the experience of game consoles.

苹果并不是唯一一个对以用户为中心的创新嗤之以鼻的公司。如果任天堂能够仔细观察青少年在地下室使用现有游戏机的情况，它将为他们提供他们显然需要的东西：一个功能强大、具有复杂3D处理的游戏机，使他们能够更好地沉浸在虚拟世界中。相反，任天堂在开发Wii时没有接近用户。任天堂高级营销总监宫本茂（Shigeru Miyamoto）表示，“我们不使用以消费者为中心的群体。我们从行业开发者那里得到了很多反馈。”这让任天堂完全重新定义了游戏机的体验。

The iPod and the Wii were outside the spectrum of possibilities of what people knew and did. But they were not outside what they could dream of and love, if only someone could propose it to them.

iPod和Wii超出了人们所知所行的可能性范围。但如果有人能向他们求婚，他们就不在他们梦想和爱的范围之外。

Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks. And it may even be that the iPad will not succeed. (My feeling is that its success strongly depends on developers. If they create applications specifically tailored for this device, instead of simply adapting existing applications running on notebooks, then the iPad could mark a new era in mobile computing. The potential is there, given that Apple is using the same collaborative innovation strategy devised for the iPhone.)

创造激进创新的公司提出建议。他们提出了一个愿景。当然，这样做会带来更大的风险。甚至可能iPad也不会成功。（我的感觉是，iPad的成功在很大程度上取决于开发者。如果他们专门为这款设备开发应用程序，而不是简单地改造运行在笔记本电脑上的现有应用程序，那么iPad可能标志着移动计算的一个新纪元。鉴于苹果正在使用同样的合作创新战略，潜力是存在的（这是为iPhone设计的。）

My 10 years of research on breakthrough innovations by companies such as Apple, Nintendo, and Alessi, which are summarized in my book Design-Driven Innovation, shows, however, that these radical proposals are not created by chance. And they do not simply come from intuition of a visionary guru. They come from a very precise process and capabilities.

然而，我对苹果、任天堂和阿莱西等公司的突破性创新进行了10年的研究，这些研究在我的《设计驱动创新》一书中进行了总结，结果表明，这些激进的建议并非偶然产生的。它们不仅仅来自一位有远见的大师的直觉。它们来自一个非常精确的过程和能力。

Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.

由于这一过程，这些公司成为一系列激进的创新者。他们以非用户为中心的建议不是没有基础的梦想。有时他们会失败。但当他们工作时，人们对他们的爱甚至超过了通过仔细研究他们的需求而开发的产品。

Roberto Verganti is professor of the management of innovation at Politecnico di Milano and a member of the board of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management. He has served as an executive advisor, coach, and educator at a variety of firms, including Ferrari, Ducati, Whirlpool, Xerox, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Barilla, Nestlè, STMicroelectronics, and Intuit.

Roberto Verganti是米兰理工大学创新管理学教授，也是欧洲管理高级研究所董事会成员。他曾在多家公司担任执行顾问、教练和教育家，包括法拉利、杜卡迪、惠而浦、施乐、三星、惠普、巴里拉、雀巢、意法半导体和Intuit。

Roberto Verganti is the author of Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean (Harvard Business Press, 2009) and Innovation of Meaning (forthcoming from MIT Press). He is a professor of leadership and innovation at Politecnico di Milano.

Roberto Verganti是《设计驱动的创新：通过彻底创新事物的含义来改变竞争规则》（哈佛商业出版社，2009年）和《意义的创新》（麻省理工学院出版社即将出版）的作者。他是米兰理工大学领导与创新教授。