Quotes About Innovation

the more general problem of schools favoring memorized answers over creative questions is nothing new. Some point out that it's built into an educational system that was created in a different time, the Industrial Age, and for a different purpose.

For a questioner, it's important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By "living with" a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

Google's scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil47 revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.

If you fear not having answers to the questions you might ask yourself, remember that one of the hallmarks of innovative problem solvers is that they are willing to raise questions without having any idea of what the answer might be. Part of being able to tackle complex and difficult questions is accepting that there is nothing wrong with not knowing. People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.

In one of his lectures on creativity, the comedian John Cleese talked about the need to find one's own "tortoise enclosure"—that19 sheltered, quiet place where you can go for extended periods to escape from the distractions of the outside world so that you can think without interruption.

This Why–What If–How progression—which can be identified in many stories of innovative breakthroughs—is

I position myself relentlessly as an idiot at IDEO," Bennett observes. "And that's not a negative, it's a positive. Because being comfortable with not knowing—that's the first part of being able to question.

That's because with each new advance, Thrun said, one must pause to ask, Now that we know what we now know, what's possible now?

We've seen that companies sometimes use a hypothetical What If question to temporarily remove constraints that can inhibit ambitious thinking (What if cost weren't an issue—how might we do things differently?), and the same principle applies when people are pursuing new ideas or embarking on change in their lives. Often the biggest constraint is fear of failure.

That, right there, is a beautiful question for the ages: What do you want to say? Why does it need to be said? What if you could say it in a way that has never before been done? How might you do that?

Through the years, companies from Polaroid (Why do we have to wait for the picture?) to Pixar (Can animation be cuddly?21) have started with questions. However, when it comes to questioning, companies are like people: They start out doing it, then gradually do it less and less. A hierarchy forms, a methodology is established, and rules are set; after that, what is there to question?

When you change one small thing32 and it works, it can help breed the confidence to change other things—including bigger ones.

nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn't valuable—but when it's time to question, it can get in the way.

It's one thing to see a problem and to question why the problem exists—and maybe even wonder whether there might be a better alternative. It's another to keep asking those questions even after experts have told you, in effect, "You can't change this situation; there are good reasons why things are the way they are.

But if we can't compete with technology when it comes to storing answers, questioning—that uniquely human capacity—is our ace in the hole. Until Watson acquires the equivalent of human curiosity, creativity, divergent thinking skills, imagination, and judgment, it will not be able to formulate the kind of original, counterintuitive, and unpredictable questions an innovative thinker—or even just your average four-year-old—can come up with.

Yes, we want a Silicon Valley," she said, "but do we really want three hundred million people who actually think for themselves?

In analyzing a series of setbacks, a key question to ask is Am I failing differently each time? "If you keep making the same68 mistakes again and again," the IDEO founder David Kelley has observed, "you aren't learning anything. If you keep making new and different mistakes, that means you are doing new things and learning new things.

Basic formula: Q (questioning) + A (action) = I (innovation). On the other hand, Q – A = P (philosophy).

Epiphanies often are characterized as "Aha! moments," but that suggests the problem has been solved in a flash. More often, insights arrive as What if moments—bright possibilities that are untested and open to question.)

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.

At the same time, as Yamashita points out, it's just as important to look forward when asking big questions about purpose. He urges clients to work on Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires "envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.

A recent article in Fast Company pointed out that a11 number of today's leading companies—Nike, Apple, Netflix—have increasingly been finding success by moving outside their primary area of expertise. The article, with the provocative headline "Death to Core Competency," suggests that whatever a company's specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level.

In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.

Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel's focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.