CHAPTER 13 On Creative Spirit
The iPhone. A beautiful jigsaw that has been through a lengthy and
ever-inventive series of iterations, at every turn revealing imaginative and
exciting new ideas. When Steve Jobs unveiled it for the first time on June
29, 2007, we were mesmerized. We marvelled, not only at Jobs’s charismatic
showmanship – “There’s just one more thing....” – but also at the magical
device he held in his hand. Jobs, ever the impresario, stated:Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes
everything.It was, of course, revolutionary and it certainly changed everything.
Had it really appeared, however, fully formed from nowhere? A moment of
divine inspiration? Of course not. It was the product of other ideas, them-
selves the product of other ideas, themselves the product of other ideas...
If we interpret the iPhone as a jigsaw using Berkun’s metaphor, we see
a huge number of technologies coming together. What was remarkable
about Jobs’s “revolutionary product” was the way it took so many existing
ideas, each one a myriad of complexity, and wove them together seemingly
effortlessly to create a product we had never seen before — and yet we had
seen, in its constituent parts many times before.
Here lies the allure of invention. We see a radically new product and it
seems at once unimaginable, and yet so right and so obvious.
Let’s examine the pieces of the iPhone jigsaw in a little more detail,
exploring how each one of the ideas that came together to form the iPhone
is itself the product of other ideas. At the most abstract level, the iPhone
weaves together a core set of ideas: the original iPod, itself the product
of many other ideas, not least Sony’s Walkman; the telephone, stemming
from mobile devices of the time (which themselves follow a long line of
ideas right back to Alexander Graham Bell — who would, I’m sure, have
loved an iPhone, perhaps in return for his earlier ideas which helped bring
it into being); the camera, with its own long line of precursors; and the list
goes on. Everything, in short, is made from other things.