Quotes About Innovation

Designing, building, and maintaining a great Web site or app isn't easy. It's like golf: a handful of ways to get the ball in the hole, a million ways not to.

One way to look at design—any kind of design—is that it's essentially about constraints

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.   AT

Moving on and not looking back, not living in the past, was a way to trick myself into further creativity.

iPhone just synced perfectly with toaster. All is well.

The gap between the best software engineering practice and the average practice is very wide—perhaps wider than in any other engineering discipline. A tool that disseminates good practice would be important. — Fred Brooks

people who believed the old theory thought the new theory was just as ridiculous then as you think the old theory is now.

Design Is a Wicked Problem Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a wicked problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it (1973). This paradox implies, essentially, that you have to solve the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again to create a solution that works.

Design is sloppy because a good solution is often only subtly different from a poor one.

the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history. Of course software has become even more complex since 1989, and Dijkstra's ratio of 1 to 109could easily be more like 1 to 1015 today.

Great video comes from thinking humans, not equipment.

You're Generation Manifestation.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

Captain Cook was one of the first to utilize the breakthrough invention called the chronometer. Until then, mariners commonly sailed north or south until they reached the latitude on which their port of destination lay. Then they would sail directly east or west. Latitude sailing

Have fun, think small, don't fear the obvious.

Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

Just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking.

Know that some people will do everything they can to game the system, finding ways to win that you never could have imagined. If only to keep yourself sane, try to applaud their ingenuity rather than curse their greed.

As long as you can tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, generating a boatload of ideas, even outlandish ones, can only be a good thing.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Another cardinal rule of thinking like a child: don't be afraid of the obvious.

Steven D. Levitt

The next time you encounter such a barrier, imposed by people who lack your imagination and drive and creativity, think hard about ignoring it. Solving a problem is hard enough; it gets that much harder if you've decided beforehand it can't be done.

Pay attention to how people respond; if their response surprises or frustrates you, learn from it and try something different.