Quotes from Scott D. Anthony

The most important thing here is to largely ignore what customers say, and instead watch what they do or track where they spend money.

Aside from the equivalent of blowing up the lab or letting a pathogen escape, the only failure is spending too long or too much money to learn.

I'm not very good at sitting still.

Every great idea emerges out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation.

A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can't cash a spreadsheet.

Too many would-be beautiful businesses that could reinvent markets and create substantial value live only in PowerPoint documents, never to be launched.

To do something different, you have to do something different.

The sad truth is as difficult as the first mile can be for entrepreneurs, it is doubly tough inside most large companies as innovators can face some significant headwinds.

You have to make the decision about whether you want to avoid or you want to overcome the resistance.

The reality is customers lie - not because they want to want to deceive you, but because they don't do a good job of predicting what they will do in the future.

Think about how much it costs to learn more. Sometimes you want to build confidence by knocking off the easy things.

When you are motivating people to do amazing things, you have to win over both their rational side and their emotive side.

People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.

If you work on a new product launch, spent time in a new geography, or work to develop a completely new skill, you have no choice but to figure out new ways to solve problems.

You can always figure out how to deliver things in somewhat controlled situations, but when you start to get into the reality of the market you start to figure out what isn't going to work.

Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.

Most companies are built to execute today's business model, not discover tomorrow's.

You can increase the odds of spotting the weak points in your approach if you really think about the end-to-end business model you plan to follow - how you plan to create, capture, and deliver value.

The school at which you studied - design school, disruptive school, TRIZ school, user-centered innovation school, etc - determines the specific words you use.

I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.