Quotes About Innovation

It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

where small niches can flourish.

New ideas need old buildings.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

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. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.

But the finest minds of the era were also devoted to an equally pressing question: What are we going to do with all of this shit?

a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

the "hummingbird effect." An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

They were not hacks, working surreptitiously for Victorian special-interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambition. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.

The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.

Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure.

IDEAS TRICKLE OUT OF SCIENCE, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and philosophy.

Why have so many good ideas flourished in the fourth quadrant, despite the lack of economic incentives? One answer is that economic incentives have a much more complicated relationship to the development and adoption of good ideas than we usually imagine. The promise of an immense payday encourages people to come up with useful innovations, but at the same time it forces people to protect those innovations.

If ideas were fully liberated, then entrepreneurs wouldn't be able to profit from their innovations, because their competitors would immediately adopt them. And so where innovation is concerned, we have deliberately built inefficient markets: environments that protect copyrights and patents and trade secrets and a thousand other barricades we've erected to keep promising ideas out of the minds of others.

Está en la naturaleza de las buenas ideas el subirse a hombros de los gigantes que las precedieron, lo que implica que, en alguna medida, toda innovación importante resulta ser fundamentalmente una red.

The art of human invention has more than one muse.