Apple has been rolling out game-changing products in steady succession, while keeping their R&D spending at $4.6 billion, or roughly 10% of earnings over the last four years. And as Steve Cheney points out, that’s at odds with the strategy of some of its competitors.

Example: Microsoft, in contrast, have spent a whopping $31 billion—700% that of Apple—over the last four years.

Real innovation starts by thinking long and hard about your customers’ problems, about how solutions to those problems are being unmet, and then finding better ways to solve those problems in ways that benefit your customers…first.

Roger Ebert, whose writing has been absolutely on fire these past few years, has weighed in on Hollywood’s infatuation with 3-D films, giving it a big thumbs down.

The distractions that 3-D movies demand of its audience are obvious to anyone who has had to endure wearing a pair of those goofy glasses—and that will play a large part in this being fad that falls out of fashion just as surely as it has before. But Ebert touches on another important point: great films…great and successful films…have found their audience just fine over the years without 3-D, and it’s hard to imagine how any of them would be improved via this newest tech obsession.

The lesson here is this: you can dress up a mediocre product with gimmicks and while it may initially attract a little attention, soon people will tire of it.

The way to reach an audience and to get them coming back for more is by telling a great story—or in the case of studio executives, by having an eye for a good story when it hits the desk.

It’s that simple. And that hard.

Forget the labels on things, pull together ideas that you might otherwise assume would be an impossible match — the results can sometimes be really surprising. 

Case in point: could you ever imagine Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis jamming on the same stage? Neither could I, until I saw this…  

But there’s also a message in there for everyone who is fond of being on the viewfinder-end of things—be it the monitor you’re looking into right now, or a camera. For all its virtues, that electronic window—like the hero in the Fellini film—can only bear witness to happenings. It can capture, yes. But can never really live that sweet life.

It’s an important lesson that bears repeating in business. We all want happiness and fulfilment in what we do. And part of that is to be generous with the time you make for family and friends. That’s where the sweet life lives.