Corporate Entrepreneurship of Steve Jobs

Résumé du document

During the seminar, we used different case studies of the US management and leadership in applying theoretical concepts. In this assignment, I have chosen to analyze the CEO of the company Apple because of its particular way to lead the company that he created. Steve Jobs was trained as an engineer and was not prepared to become the head of a company generating a 24 billion dollar turnover. Steve Jobs has used a particular way to manage his company and his team towards success. The qustions that come up are, the way of leading his company reflects a leader or manager ? Did Steve Jobs meet difficulties to set up his way of thinking? How did he manage the quick growth of his company? In the seminar, we improved the definition of corporate entrepreneurship as 'the sum of the organization's innovation, renewal, and venturing efforts.' Thus, does Apple corporate entrepreneurship management correspond to this definition? The success of Apple is effectively mainly based on its capacity to provide new products.

Extraits

[...] there is a high potential of growth linked to these new customers. Moreover, this increase will not stop soon given that there still have growth potential. To illustrate this situation, whereas we saw in the example of Europe, that there is a big growth of the number of people having access to Internet in Europe, only of European people have really access to Internet. Source : http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm As a conclusion to this part, the High Technology sector is conducive to famous corporate entrepreneurship given that it is really difficult to stay competitive on this sector at long term, because of the necessity to be always innovating. [...]

[...] Since 1998, Amazon gets a patent on One Click Purchase that the company developed. Although Amazon does not know if this patent could still exist because of legal issues, for instance the company succeeds in staying competitive thanks to the setting up of patents. This product consists in purchasing products with only one click, thanks to information presents in cookies of the customers' computer. Amazon is developing a new market : the sale of music without DRM, which means music for MP3. [...]

[...] Secondly, Apple is also able to revitalize the enterprise's operations by making evolve the scope of its business. Indeed, Steve Jobs improved business in other areas in launching in 2001, a new products range with iPod, a portable media player launched in 2001, and iTunes, a digital media player application for playing and organizing digital Music and video files. Thirdly, Steve Jobs did not only provide computers and other tools in the IT sector. He also oriented the company to other business areas with the creation of the Pixar Animation studios, in 1986. [...]

[...] Secondly, as if he is the CEO of the company and that he is at the initiative of all the company's creations, he needs the approval of its team. At the beginning, he needed the approval of his partner Stephen Wozniak. Then, he has had to get the aproval of all investors and of the board of Directors. Concerning the selling of ideas internally first, it is the same way to proceed as for approval of each project. Corporate entrepreneurship also involves a lack of ownership and control. [...]

[...] First of all, Apple started with a corporate growth strategy based on the improvement and the launch of new products. As we observed previously, the company has the capacity to find ideas of new products fast and which corresponds to customers' needs. Thus, the corporate growth strategy is definitely the improvement of innovations for a better competitiveness Secondly, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak have the capacity to well analyze their product portfolio in terms of lifecycle categories and adapt their strategy to it. [...]