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'Steve Jobs Didn't Really Invent Anything.' Really??

SAP

Apple Inventor-in-Chief Steve Jobs (Image via Wikipedia)

News Flash: Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything!

Not the Mac. Not the iPod. Not the Next cube.

So says tech-industry pundit Mark Anderson, CEO of Strategic News Service, as part of his strategic predictions for 2012.

Let me help you wrap your willing suspension of disbelief around this: if you thought Steve Jobs invented the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, iTunes, the iPad, and various other profoundly successful and influential products, you’d be wrong.

Because, you see, Jobs didn’t “invent” them; no, he merely “integrated” them.

Here’s the actual quote from Anderson, made to Arik Hesseldahl of AllThingsD.com in an interview last week about the mega-theme for his annual predictions, called “Integrating Everything”:

“It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated,” Anderson tells Hesseldahl. “We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

Hesseldahl’s intriguing article covers all of Anderson’s 10 predictions for 2012, and I’d recommend you take a look—definitely some sharp thinking involved. But I want to return to the bit about Steve Jobs.

Thematically, Anderson makes a great point about the abundance of intelligent devices swarming almost every facet of our lives, and the potential for more value to be generated via the integration of those devices.

Plus, Anderson’s been a provocative thinker and writer for some time who’s built a strong following, and his willingness to present challenging assertions about what the future will bring can be not only diverting but also insightful and valuable.

But still.

“Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all.”

Really?

Perhaps I’ve fallen right into Anderson’s trap by calling out an audacious claim he inserted into his interview specifically so writers like me would see it and say “that’s audacious and I’m going to write about that and say how audacious it is!” If so, shame on me.

Or perhaps we need to reevaluate, here at the cusp of 2012, what it means to invent versus what it means to integrate. (Or, as a third alternative, perhaps this is a meaningless exercise in word-splitting—but I’m going to let that one go for now.)

Here’s why I think the invent-or-integrate thing matters: at a time when businesses around the world are striving to apply innovation and fresh thinking to their strategy, their processes, their customer engagements, and their products, will they find a greater ROI in pursuing inventions or integrations?

Should they be looking to create lots more new things, or should they be looking for clever recombinations of existing things?

I think where Anderson is way off in his comment on Jobs as non-inventor is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation—in fact, I’d argue that the most-successful companies going forward will be those that continue to invent while they also pursue breakthrough approaches to integration.

Did Steve Jobs “invent” the incredible glass surfaces of the iPhone and the iPad? Certainly not—but he sure as heck invented the need for them and the vast potential behind the revolutionary touch-input archetype created by the cobmination of that glass surface and the applications and interactions sitting under it.

Maybe we should think of it as invention through integration, or integration-driven invention. Either way, the fundamental point is the same: Steve Jobs saw things none of the rest of us saw, and he drove the creation of things no other company could create.

If that’s not inventing, then maybe it’s time to retire that word from the English language.

(Follow me on Twitter at bobevansSAP.)

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