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EE Vignette 3: Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, and the smartphone revolution

The story of Apple’s massive successes with the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone is in media and arts tightly interwoven with the story of its enigmatic co-founder and returning Messiah, Steve Jobs. And indeed, it would be hard to argue that without Jobs’s participation and agency, technological, sociocultural, regulatory and other environmental factors would have driven the personal computer and later smartphone developments in the same direction as we have experienced.10 For sure, most of the technological capabilities would have appeared and come to use in some manner, but in a counterfactual world without Steve Jobs—and let’s not forget the chief designer, Jony Ive—these capabilities might not have been unleashed in the same form, at the same time, or with the same force as they factually did. The lack of revolutionary novelty from Apple after Jobs’ passing also supports attributing much to the individuals in this case.
And yet, Apple’s success would not have been possible without a substantial quantity of external enablement, either. As detailed by Mazzucato (2013), Apple combined an array of technological advances, made and paid for outside of Apple—primarily government-funded military and university research. In addition, their success was favored by some regulatory changes and enforcement efforts.
But does this make the state an entrepreneurial agent, as suggested by the title Mazzucato choose for her book? To us, the case highlights the opacity and agency-intensity of EE mechanisms that emerge and which creative entrepreneurs have to overcome to attain success. To see how the range of technologies can be combined to create a smartphone when no such thing exists requires not just broad and deep technological knowledge but also extraordinary creative imagination. And while all the government-funded research had brought the agency-intensity of creating such a product down from astronomical to (evidently) manageable levels, very considerable time, effort, and investment were required on Apple’s part to overcome the risk and uncertainty of converting the technological potentials into a working, affordable, and broadly adopted product. Perhaps ‘the enabling state’ would be a more suitable portrayal of the role played by the government.
The case also illustrates the problem of Shane and Venkataraman’s (2000) notion of ‘objective opportunities’ as agent-independent combinations of favorable circumstances. Technologies do not combine themselves into smartphones; their affordances do not automatically or autonomously enact themselves (Pentland et al., 2022). Technological enablement usually comes with considerable opacity and agency-intensity, requiring agents to connect the dots (Baron, 2006).
In other instances, involving other types of EEs, enablement may be more fortuitous than strategic. For example, Davidsson (2016, p. 229) lists the many contextual circumstances that favored the freesheet Metro’s success in its original market in Stockholm in the mid-1990s. The choice of other locations to launch in, coupled with the at times dismal outcomes of these launches, suggest the founders were not fully aware of the combination of favorable circumstances behind the success they had achieved in Stockholm.
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