Quotes About Innovation

When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.

May I say that I approve of a piece that tries to remake the entire puzzle?

Fantasy writers, they're the bane of our existence!

The best way to predict future is to create it. Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to predict the future is to create it.

all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own. [2002] p.46

There's a simple, but oft-neglected lesson here: to sustain success, you have to be willing to abandon things that are no longer successful.

New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

There's no such thing as "sustaining" leadership; it must be reinvented again and again.

To discover the future it is not necessary to be a seer, but it is absolutely vital to be unorthodox.

Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.

the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer is no.

What's needed are radically new organizational models that downplay formal structure. In a world of relentless change, trade-offs need to be made as close to the front lines as possible. Boundaries must be malleable. Resources, rather than being hoarded, must flow unhindered toward promising opportunities. Interunit coordination must be the product of nimble, self-organizing communities and market-like transactions rather than blanket policies or cumbersome councils.

FIGURE 2-1 US employment in occupations based on importance of originality to job performance

Contrary to conventional wisdom, what makes a job low skilled is not the nature of the work it entails, or the credentials required, but whether or not the people performing the task have the opportunity to grow their capabilities and tackle novel problems. The most important lesson to be gleaned from post-bureaucratic pioneers is that it's possible to radically upskill what would otherwise be regarded as low-skilled jobs

Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.

It is our bureaucracy-encrusted organizations that are slow witted, not the people inside them.

a different result requires doing something different.

Other people labeled things impossible not because they couldn't be done, but because no one was doing them.

We can't educate today's students for tomorrow's challenges with yesterday's schools.

why would we want to freeze the system and disable our students by getting them perfectly ready for yesterday, when we know they will have to move headlong into a very different tomorrow? Every one of those students needs to be ready for life outside the trenches.

We have a choice. We can simply defend what we have or create what we need.

indebted to Eric von Hippel of MIT, who has inspired my work since we met in the early 1980s and who generously provided detailed comments and suggestions on several chapters.