Quotes About Innovation

The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones.

Developing new ideas requires questions and approaches that most people won't understand initially, which leaves many true innovators at risk of becoming lonely, misunderstood characters.

I couldn't help but consider what Washington Roebling, one of the engineers of the Brooklyn Bridge, once wrote: "Man is after all a finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work. But when it comes to planning, one mind can in a few hours think out enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years."2

Over time, creative masters learn to find, evaluate, and explore more combinations than other people. They get better at guessing which combinations will be more interesting, so their odds improve. They also learn there are patterns that can be used to develop new ideas.

At the heart of the debate over how to overcome the challenges of shipping good things is an idea referenced in the title of Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar.1 The book, which is about observations on making software, raises a central question that is relevant to all work: Is it better to invest time in making a big masterful plan or instead to start immediately and figure it out as you go?

Technology does have an impact on behavior, but culture comes first.

Some conversations need to be real time. Brainstorming and teaching

The problem was coherence. We certainly launched many things, but did it add up to making a better product?

To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion. All the rational people, despite their brilliance, are too reasonable to start crazy things. And working against us in this sense was that we'd spent the day walking in the footsteps of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, spurring us all to believe in our grandest dreams.

Many smart people can recognize when there is a problem, but few expend the energy to find a solution, and then summon the courage to do it.

Permission, on creative matters, is for cowards.

Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal.

Look for smart ways around a problem or faster ways to resolve them. Make effective use of the people around you instead of assuming you have to do everything yourself.

It's a shockingly recent notion that work and play should be mutually exclusive things. We learn about ourselves and each other through play, which helps us work together.

an idea is a combination of other ideas.

Innovating comes at a price: it might be money, time, sanity, friends, or marriages, but there will definitely be one.

The most dangerous tradition we hold about work is that it must be serious and meaningless.

There must be someone challenging ideas in ways their creators don't necessarily like in order for those creators to see the blind spots in their thinking. Breakthroughs await in those blind spots.

The responsibility of people in power is to continually eliminate useless traditions and introduce valuable ones. An organization where nothing ever changes is not a workplace but a living museum.

For example, if you tell me my job is to cook the french fries, I will resist anything that threatens the existence of french fries, since when they go away, so does my job. But if you tell me my job is to make side dishes for customers, I'll be open to changing from fries to onion rings or other side dishes, even ones we've yet to invent, since my identity isn't tied to a particular side dish but instead to the role side dishes play.

After years of leading projects, the best thing I've learned is that I have to periodically shift between thinking small (bazaar) and thinking long term (cathedral).

To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion. All the rational people, despite their brilliance, are too reasonable to start crazy things.

I'd take a great team with bad methods over a lousy team with great methods any day.

creativity is rarely efficient. It always involves taking chances and trying things that might work but might not. The question then is: are we willing to spend time to be interesting, to think interesting thoughts and make interesting things? We all have the power, but perhaps not the willingness.