Apple is the most innovative consumer products company of the last decade. It has redefined how people listen to music, blindsiding both music publishers and established electronics manufacturers. And it has reinvented the telephone.

Yet Apple's achievement is not the result of its technology. The gizmos in the gadgets are much the same as the gizmos already in other companies' gadgets. Apple's success lies in deploying existing technology in ways that meet consumers' needs and in attracting buyers through coolly designed devices that do not require you to be a computer geek to use them.

We despise geeks - but we are also intimidated by them, and they retain a powerful influence on our thinking. When we talk about innovation, we visualise men and women in white coats with test tubes and microscopes. Outside many university cities around the world there are biotechnology estates established by governments that believe high technology is the key to a competitive future. The funds that governments provide to support innovation are all too often appropriated by large companies that are better at forming committees to pontificate about what the global village will want in the future than they are at assessing what their customers want today.