STEVE JOBS WALKED ONTO THE Macworld stage in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2007, and announced, "Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone." He promised that the first-generation iPhone would be available for purchase in just six months - but the prototype Jobs held in his hand was far from a finished product. His team was still working on developing a more durable touchscreen for the smartphone. Although glass was one option, Apple had been unable to find a material that did not shatter when the phone was dropped.
Immediately after the presentation, Jobs called Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning, the company that Thomas Edison had engaged to create the glass encasements for the world's first light bulbs. Jobs gave Weeks just a few days to decide whether Corning would partner with Apple to develop a durable glass touchscreen. For Weeks, such a commitment would mean redirecting critical resources and 300 people away from the company's successful LCD business, a division delivering much-needed cash flow. He also noted a palpable fear of failure, telling me later, "There were some in the company who thought what Jobs wanted was an impossibility. If we took this on and failed, Jobs would turn Corning into a pariah because we would have been the ones who stopped the iPhone."
Corning's dilemma - how and when to divert limited resources and know-how to an unproven new product line represents a common reinvention challenge that most organizations face at some point. When successful, reinvention can lead to breakthrough innovations like Gorilla Glass, the product that emerged from Corning's decision to partner with Apple and has since been used in over 8 billion devices by more than 45 major brands.
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