Quotes About Innovation

We'd like to bury the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way, a red way and a blue way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

conventional wisdom dies hard.

Borody claims to have used fecal transplants to effectively cure people who were suffering from ulcerative colitis—which, he says, was

most radical accomplishment of once-and-done is that it changed the frame of the relationship between the charity and the donor.

Steven D. Levitt

se podría meter un camión por los agujeros de nuestros protocolos».

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg understood this. "In medicine, or in science, [if] you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don't have to go down that path again," he said. "In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government.

first is about problem solving generally. Kobayashi redefined the problem he was trying to solve. What question were his competitors asking? It was essentially: How do I eat more hot dogs? Kobayashi asked a different question: How do I make hot dogs easier

Steven D. Levitt

Shaw reportedly said. "I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Steven D. Levitt

When you ask the question differently, you look for answers in different places.

So when it comes to solving problems, channeling your inner child can really pay off. It all starts with thinking small.

One of the best things about having a blog is that you've got a place to run your craziest ideas up the flagpole and see just how quickly they get shot down.

When the solution to a given problem doesn't lay right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists. But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.

After all, just because you're at the office is no reason to stop thinking.

Because each day is different, I thrive on creating something out of nothing, and I love running a business. I also flourish when I know what's going on across the company and who's doing what with whom and why. I love learning from customers, and I marvel at the knowledge and experience of people who contribute to the creation of great products.

Geniuses don't go mad," he said. "That's what people don't understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.

Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

If there is a single maxim that runs through this book's arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.