Quotes About Innovation

This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.

The reasons for the failure of the Leninist economic model have been studied thoroughly and in the case of North Korea they were essentially the same as elsewhere: distorted price information, lack of incentives for innovation and quality improvement, and an ingrained inability to handle data efficiently.

Little plots and stories, acted out and screened, can't possibly be called cinema. They have nothing whatever to do with cinema. A cinematographic work is above all a work which would not be possible in any other art form. In other words. it can be created by means of cinema, and cinema alone

Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious—being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so—still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself.

Pioneering don't pay.

All the good thoughts have already been had. What we're left with is trite redundant nothingness, or shitposting. I choose the latter.

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

Reason cannot operate without imagination.

Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.

The line between the 'mechanical' and the 'intelligent' was very, very slightly blurred.

More testing should be done automatically. It's important to note that by automatically we meant that the test /results/ are interpreted automatically as well.

Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution

perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software.

Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship.

Don't be a slave to any notation;

We frequently hear software development leaders tell their staff, "We should operate like Netflix" (or one of these other leading companies). Of course you could do that. First, get yourself a few hundred thousand servers and tens of millions of users...

People find it easier to join an ongoing success. Show them a glimpse of the future and you'll get them to rally around.

Let the computer do the repetitious, the mundane—it will do a better job of it than we would. We've got more important and more difficult things to do.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it's the only one you have. • Emil-Auguste Chartier, Propos sur la religion, 1938 Engineers

All software becomes legacy as soon as it's written.

Grace Hopper: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

Prototyping is a learning experience. Its value lies not in the code produced, but in the lessons learned. That's really the point of prototyping.

Once they've agreed to the layout, you might throw it away and recode

you may not even need to code in order to prototype architecture—you can prototype on a whiteboard, with Post-it notes or index cards.