Steve Jobs. The Innovative Entrepreneur

Steve Jobs: The Innovative Entrepreneur

Background

Steve Jobs was an influential entrepreneur, investor and innovator who is considered to have been one of the most brilliant and powerful men in the worlds of business and technology. Job’s career had more triumphs than defeats and was he stands out as one person who revolutionized numerous fields. Compared with other leading technologists and entrepreneurs, Jobs was able to achieve great success in distinctly different industries. Being a strongly opinionated perfectionist clearly driven by success in any venture he undertook, Jobs was able to transform, at global scales, a number of industries. Walter Isaacson, a notable biographer recognizes Jobs as a creative entrepreneur whose passion and ferocious drive revolutionized six key industries including; phones, digital publishing, tablet computing, animated movies and personal computers (Blumenthal, 2012). Jobs is, the ultimate icon of entrepreneurship, inventiveness and applied imagination, an individual who could best create value by integrating creativity, technology and entrepreneurship skills.

Personal Profile

Steve Jobs was born on the 24 February 1955 in San Francisco, California to unwed college graduates Joanne Simpson and Abdulfatta Jandali. The biological parents gave him up for adoption at birth to Paul and Clara Jobs and grew up in California as a free-spirited young loner. Jobs was fascinated with electronics from an early age and attended homestead high School and Cupertino junior High School, both in California. It was at Homestead that Jobs met and befriended Bill Fernandez who introduced him to his long-term partner, Steve Wozniak, a computer genius. Jobs gained interest in Wozniak’s 1969s computer board originally named the Cream soda Computer. In 1972, Steve Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon where he dropped out within a period of six months, (Blumenthal, 2012).

Towards the end of 1973, Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari, inc. where he worked until mid 1974 before leaving for India to find spiritual enlightenment.

Jobs stayed in India for seven months, living a life of poverty before returning to California where he returned to Atari and assumed a position in which he created a circuit board for the arcade video game, Breakout. Shortly thereafter, Jobs and Wozniak instituted a business that built and sold digital blue box. The digital blue box was the ultimate combination of electronics and pranks, a model many regard as having laid a critical foundation towards the creation of Apple. The blue box was able to generate tones that could manipulate the telephone network allowing users to make free long-distance calls. At the age of 21 in the year 1976, Jobs and Wozniak entered into a venture in which they sold computer circuit boards designed and built by Wozniak (Cusumano, 2011).

Business Personality of Choice

Jobs is the business personality of choice due to his varied scope of achievement. In addition to transforming multiple industries such as computers and phones, Jobs was also an astute businessman and entrepreneur, a skilled motivator, an excellent showman, a gifted strategist, a great negotiator and a decisive judge throughout his career. Steve’s unique non-traditional approach to entrepreneurship is even more fascinating. The entrepreneur is more than visionary, innovative and inspirational, an individual who repeatedly succeeded in diverse fields. Under his leadership, Apple was able to recover from dwindling financial fortune to be ranked as the most valuable company in the world based on market cap. Steve Jobs proved to be both an outstanding entrepreneur and a visionary leader who was able to use his skills and assets to lead Apple to the apex (Blumenthal, 2012). Despite facing multiple challenges from time to time, Jobs was able to differentiate himself from other entrepreneurs and continuously evolve and remain relevant by learning from past mistakes. The paper attempts to analyze leading entrepreneurs and Jobs, remains one of the most captivating and innovative entrepreneurs in both the 20th and the 21st Centuries. Apple is considered his greatest creation, a platform where imagination was developed, nurtured, applied, and executed in ways that made it the most valuable company on earth. Job’s entrepreneurial spirits drove him to come up with ideas and products that he believed were the best in the world. In overall, the notable businessman is the personality of choice owing to his personality, inspirational designs, breathtaking product concepts and brilliant business and marketing strategies from which other entrepreneurs can learn from (Elliot, 2012).

Apple Computers

In partnership with Steve Wozniak, Steve jobs created Apple Computers in April 1976 by creating and releasing Apple 1. The product was designed by Wozniak while Jobs handled the business and marketing aspects. According to Imbimbo (2009), Job’s innovativeness and determination to succeed were evident from the early years of Apple. At the beginning, Jobs contacted a local computer store, Byte shop, which immediately ordered 50 machines on condition that they were to be delivered fully assembled. Jobs realized the dream by enthusiastically setting off the project, by securing materials from suppliers through the promise of payment upon the execution of the purchase order. Working around the clock, Jobs and Wozniak were able to deliver the computers on time, pay the suppliers and even had profits left over. With the initial success, Jobs and Wozniak were able to gain the backing of A.C. Markkula who lent them $250,000 to create Apple in 1976 (Blumenthal, 2012).

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