Ahead of the forthcoming iPhone launch, The Economist has this week a great set of articles on Steve Jobs and Apple. The special report focuses on how Steve Jobs' and Apple's destinies are so closely related with great insights on how Jobs became stronger during his years out of Apple, setting up both NeXt (foundations of the current Mac OS X) and Pixar.

The leaders' article attempts to benchmark Apple to identify best practices on innovation. While three of the drivers are actually replicable, i.e. internalisation of external innovation, focus on simplicity and fail wisely, the fourth factor - be able to ingore public opinion in product development - is actually quite a different story. It would actually be a clear source of failure for a lot of companies that would hence come up with products nobody wants except the engineers that loaded them with features. Net net, it boils down to being Apple, or rather being Apple led by Steve Jobs' gut and successful track record. At the end, innovation still remains more an art than a science that can be benchmarked and "best-practiced"....

By the way, the iPhone has now a launch date - June 29th - in the US and rumours have it that 3 million units will be available at launch. It seems Walt Mossberg already got one and is rather positive. Apple also rolled out a whole new set of TV commercials that you can watch on the Apple store.