Quotes About Innovation

One of my favorites is "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

When you're facing in the wrong direction, progress means walking backward.

We are entering the Age of Awareness, marked by machine intelligence everywhere.

When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better.

Nikolaus Otto built and sold the first internal-combustion gasoline engine in 1861, and Rudolf Diesel built his engine in 1897

new ideas take over a vacuum formerly occupied by no well-articulated idea at all. That happens for either of two reasons: new ideas responding to new information made possible by new measurements, or else responding to new "outlooks." (Among historians of science, the term used rather than the inadequate English term "outlook" is the German Fragestellung—literally, the posing of a question, but more broadly meaning a worldview from which that question can arise.)

To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious, but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution

But discoveries are what usually egg us on. Not finding anything would be very bad indeed.

Being a heretic can be fun, but being a successful heretic is mostly hard work.

RIDLEY Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist

The famous Canadian physician William Osler once wrote, "In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn.

In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

After the visit, George wrote an essay, "Turing's Cathedral," which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google's founders had in store for the world. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of his hosts after his talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI.

optimization under constraints," and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it," Albert Einstein

Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.

There is no possible protection from technology except by technology," he wrote. "When you create a new environment with one phase of technology,

American Telephone & Telegraph, the largest company of them all,

Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher,

Xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere.

The one that's really new is the lowest-priced, too!" In the more rarefied sectors of Madison Avenue, a resort to rhymed slogans is usually regarded as an indication of artistic depravity induced by commercial necessity. From

McLuhan, for one, was convinced that all efforts to preserve the old forms of author protection represent backward thinking and are doomed to failure