Comment by rickdeckard

Exactly, I've experienced the same a few times, in different industries.

That's why I can imagine Ive's company wowing the management with an early interior concept pitch, but then demanding also exterior design ownership as part of the agreement because "it needs to be a coherent design, like an iPhone".

Sounds perfectly reasonable and easy to vouch for. Management feels like they are anyway in control because they decide whether to launch the product or not.

But if the product starts to shift over the course of the development, someone in management has to make the call. And that's a very expensive call to make.

I've personally been with companies which had such big-name collaborations that "deviated" from expectations in very advanced development-stages.

I've seen companies successfully intervening, but more often than that scale-down the project or cancelling the entire collaboration and ending the project, as no partial solution could be agreed on.

The latter was especially common with Design Companies (e.g. Porsche Design, Prada, the earlier LVMH), as their contracts were not phrased for collaboration but for creative control. I would assume Jony Ive sees himself in the same bracket...