Quotes About Innovation

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently," he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

So that's our approach. Very simple, and we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple." Apple's design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

Art, art of any kind, shows that folks are trying.

Industry is a far better horse to ride a genius.

We need — and should encourage and honour — not only discoverers of facts hitherto unknown but explorers of ideas and rethinkers of values.

I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one.

Es gibt genügend praktische Erfindungen, die uns keinerlei Trost spenden", hatte Dylia einmal ihren Brüdern mitgeteilt. "Aber viel zu wenige trostspendende, die überhaupt keinen praktischen Nutzen haben.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn't excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things." – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.

America was living off the canned foods of art, the things held over from years before. It knew, vaguely, that there was fresh fruit, fresh meat on the tables of Paris, and it wanted its share.

Si no cambias, te cambian, ésa es la lógica del progreso. Si te quedas petrificado en la costumbre, la historia te pasa por encima. Está demostrado que los que se resisten al cambio suelen terminar aplastados por la contundencia de los hechos.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature. Never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

Henry Huntington shaped the system of transportation which, along with other forces, launched the entire region from Santa Monica to Redlands and from San Fernando to Santa Ana, on the road to becoming the great City of Southern California.

nobody knows the solution to every problem; rather than blindly following the prescriptions of others, Africans need to think and act for themselves, and learn from their mistakes.

Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

The factory of the future will have two employees a man and a dog. The man's job will be to feed the dog. The dog's job will be to prevent the man from touching any of the automated equipment.

There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.