Quotes About Innovation

Effective marketers don't begin with a solution, with the thing that makes them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

The future belongs to chefs, not to cooks or bottle washers. It's easy to buy a cookbook (filled with instructions to follow) but really hard to find a chef book.

El mercado busca organizaciones e individuos que cambien las cosas y creen productos y servicios extraordinarios.

Los profesionales del marketing no crean productos y servicios normales y corrientes para gente corriente. Los profesionales del marketing hacen realidad el cambio. Y lo hacen normalizando nuevas conductas.

You have the freedom to change how you spend your day. You can outsource the tasks and find the guts to do emotional labor instead. You can go out on a limb and do what others aren't doing. The most frustrated marketers I know are the ones who take it as a given that because they are in industry x, they have no freedom. And so real estate brokers hustle for listings and do precisely what the other brokers do.

Think for a second about the people you know who are engaged, satisfied, eager to get to work. Most of them, I'll bet, make change. They challenge the status quo and push something forward—something they believe in. They lead.

Innovative marketers invent new solutions to work with old emotions.

the proven truth about creativity: it's the result of desire—the desire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or serve someone else.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing.

Effective marketers have the courage to create tension.

For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we'd like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn't well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it's going to work.

We're hitting an asymptote, a natural ceiling for how cheaply and how fast we can deliver uninspired work. Becoming more average, more quick, and more cheap is not as productive as it used to be.

Shipping an idea went from taking a month by boat to a few days by plane to overnight by Federal Express to a few minutes by fax to a moment by e-mail to instantaneous by Twitter. Now what? Will it arrive yesterday? So, what's left is to make—to give—art. What's left is the generosity and humanity worth paying for. What's left is to take that resistance (the very same resistance we embraced and rewarded for decades) and destroy it.

Organizations that destroy the status quo win. Individuals who push their organizations, who inspire other individuals to change the rules, thrive. Again, we're back to leadership, which can come from anyone, anywhere in the organization.

good is bad, if bad means "not a profitable thing to aspire to." And perfect is bad, because you can't top perfect. The solution lies in seeking out something that is neither good nor perfect. You want something remarkable, nonlinear, game changing, and artistic.

Creativity is a choice, it's not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else.

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone. Changed the boss's mind. Changed the school system. Changed demand for your product.

Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.

There's a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen.

Changing things—pushing the envelope and creating a future that doesn't exist yet (at the same time you're criticized by everyone else)—requires bravery.

Try not to get caught up in the echo chamber. That is probably the toughest thing when you are trying to break out and do something original.

Why is it that a common, safe, and important task is so feared by so many people? In Iconoclast, Gregory Berns uses his experience running a neuroscience research lab to explain the biological underpinnings of the resistance. In fact, public speaking is the perfect petri dish for exposing what makes us tick. It turns out that the three biological factors that drive job performance and innovation are social intelligence, fear response, and perception.

Organizations respond to competitive threats. Individuals respond to colleagues or to opportunities. Response is always better than reaction.