Quotes About Innovation

Keith Yamashita says companies can try to find their cause by asking, What does the world hunger for?

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist42 who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of connective creativity in his book Borrowing Brilliance. According to Murray, "The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas." Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who "defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.

This great quote from Close was featured recently on the site BrainPickings: "Ask yourself an interesting enough question3 and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.")

One of the difficult early challenges at this stage is to make a commitment to one idea. At the wide-open What If stage of inquiry, one tends to ask many questions, to explore multiple possibilities—from practical to far-out ideas. But when it comes time to act on an idea, you have to narrow possibilities and converge on the one deemed worthy of being taken to the next level.

All of which means that, whereas in the past one needed to appear to have "all the answers" in order to rise in companies, today, at least in some enlightened segments of the business world, the corner office is there for the askers

Cooperrider says that "organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently. To encourage or even allow questioning is to cede power

Our grandfathers and great grandfathers18 built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked." To

when we want to shake things up and instigate change, it's necessary to break free of familiar thought patterns and easy assumptions. We have to veer off the beaten neural path. And we do this, in large part, by questioning.

incumbency has an interest in maintaining the status quo. To question well, you must have the ability to say, 'It doesn't have to be that way.

These days it's easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.

As for the answer, it belongs to whoever gets to it first. Holding back ideas—hoarding your beautiful questions—is usually pointless because it's hard to make headway on something hidden in a drawer. Better to bring a question out into the light of day and trust that, with help from others, you'll get something out of it—a solution, a learning experience, an insight, a fresh perspective, a sense of purpose—that will be yours.

When companies are facing disruptive change (and these days, what company isn't?), old habits and traditions can sometimes get in the way of progress. One of the things hypothetical What If questioning can do is remove those constraints, if only briefly, to allow for more fresh thinking.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How stage; but it's critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

After observing about a hundred Q-storm sessions around the world, Gregersen has noted some patterns. "At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, 'That's enough questions.' But if you push on beyond that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventy-five.

As I was examining the ways some of today's cutting-edge companies are trying to reinvent brainstorming, an interesting trend surfaced: a specific form of questioning using three words—How might we?

questions challenge authority and disrupt established structures, processes, and systems, forcing people to have to at least think about doing something differently.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few." Beginner's

Picasso was onto this truth fifty years ago when he commented, "Computers are useless—they only give31 you answers.

most creative, successful business leaders have tended to be expert questioners. They're known to question the conventional wisdom of their industry, the fundamental practices of their company, even the validity of their own assumptions.

It's easier to act your way33 into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

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.

This works well under most circumstances, but when we wish to move beyond that default setting—to consider new ideas and possibilities, to break from habitual thinking and expand upon our existing knowledge—it helps if we can let go of what we know, just temporarily.

The elegant simplicity of Square (and that of Dorsey's earlier creation, Twitter) is a product of rigorous inquiry: Dorsey maintains that good design is about removing unnecessary features by continually asking, Do we really need this? and What can we take away?