A breakthrough innovation is what most people think of when they think of innovation – something new, bold and way ahead of the next best thing. Additionally, a breakthrough product often combines the functionality of several different products all into one. This is how I would categorize many of Apple’s products during the Steve Jobs era – especially the iPhone. When the iPhone came out it’s simplicity, beauty, power (in terms of computing capabilities), functionality and ease of use put every other phone on the market to shame. Sure there were a multitude of phones that could technically do many things that the iPhone could. When it came out, I had a Palm Treo which was technically able to play movies but they had to be formatted perfectly in order to work. It could also play music, I could surf the internet (painful, but possible) and place phone calls but nothing even came close to the refinement of doing each of these tasks on the iPhone. Eventually the other manufacturers caught up but when it came out, it was several years ahead of the competition. This type of innovation represented a large, discrete step change in performance, technology and value provided to end users.