Quotes About Innovation

Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.

Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most

In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.

Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.

Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa.

the Stone Age did not come to an end for lack of stone.

A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with 'self-management' for two decades.

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

The new and crucial ingredient was not the availability of capital, but the advent of market-tested, consumer-driven innovation.

that the flywheel of history is incremental change through trial and error, with innovation driven by recombination, and that this pertains in far more kinds of things than merely those that have genes. This

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.

The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.

Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results.

These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.

With the first steam engines, the barrier between heat and work was breached, so that coal's energy could now amplify the work of people.

Let's give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.

Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.

In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4.

every innovation to this day is the result of thousands of people exchanging ideas.

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical.

In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.