Quick – who designed the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or any of Apple’s other visionary products over the last couple of decades? Only a few years ago you would have said Steve Jobs, and you probably would have been right.

But today? Apple’s longtime design guru Jony Ive is getting the credit, and not only because he’s still with us and was deeply responsible for those products. It’s also because he and Open AI are soon to launch a next-gen AI wearable that generated some of the biggest buzz at the recent CES. Every big story needs a hero.

There’s no doubt that Ive deserves a world of credit for Apple’s past hardware successes. But the creation of a boundary breaking product like the iPhone or iPad takes more than a single vision, no matter who’s it is and how visionary it may or may not be. Success rests on execution, which often is the limiting factor on the vision.

Where would Steve Jobs’ visions have been without someone like Ive, with his boots-on-the-ground skills, to bring them to life? Conversely, ask yourself if Ive would have gotten a $6 billion payout for his ID company if not for the visionary genius of his boss, Steve Jobs?

The point is that creativity in this business is a collaboration – between designers and engineers; marketing and sales, strategists and tacticians. Creativity loves company and is often amplified by it. That said, committees don’t make good products.

The product vision – wherever it comes from – must withstand the parochial aims of the disparate stakeholders, rather than be bound by them. If there’s one lesson that Jobs and Ive taught us, and Henry Ford before them, is that customers aren’t the ones with the vision.

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