Quotes About Innovation

Certainly, with this further solid evidence of the ability of citrus fruits to combat scurvy, one would expect the British Navy to adopt this technological innovation for all ship's crews on long sea voyages, and in fact, it did so. But not until 1795, forty-eight years later. Scurvy was immediately wiped out. And after only seventy more years, in 1865, the British Board of Trade adopted a similar policy, and eradicated scurvy in the merchant marine.

The QWERTY keyboard is inefficient and awkward. This typewriter keyboard takes twice as long to learn as it should, and makes us work about twenty times harder than is necessary. But QWERTY has persisted since 1873, and today unsuspecting individuals are being taught to use the QWERTY keyboard, unaware that a much more efficient typewriter keyboard is available.

Typewriters became mechanically more efficient, and the QWERTY keyboard design was no longer necessary to prevent key jamming. The search for an improved design was led by Professor August Dvorak at the University of Washington, who in 1932 used time-and-motion studies to create a much more efficient keyboard arrangement.

The newer arrangement requires less jumping back and forth from row to row; with the QWERTY keyboard, a good typists' fingertips travel more than twelve miles a day, jumping from row to row. These unnecessary intricate movements cause mental tension, typist fatigue, and lead to more typographical errors.

One might expect, on the basis of its overwhelming advantages, that the Dvorak keyboard would have completely replaced the inferior QWERTY keyboard. On the contrary, after more than 50 years, almost all typists are still using the inefficient QWERTY keyboard.

Diffusion Is the Process by Which (1) an Innovation (2) Is Communicated Through Certain Channels (3) Over Time (4) Among the Members of a Social System

An innovation is an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption.

The average American school lags twenty-five years behind the best practice" (Mort, 1953).

A fad is an innovation that represents a relatively unimportant aspect of culture, which diffuses very rapidly, mainly for status reasons, and then is rapidly discontinued.

Other examples of fads are hula hoops, mood rings, flip-up sunglasses, and umbrella-hats.

The adoption of other highly visible innovations like new cars and hair styles is especially likely to be status motivated.

Family planning experts, in calculating the effects of contraceptive campaigns, estimate the number of births averted by calculating the pregnancies that would have occurred if contraceptives had not been adopted; the concept of births averted is not very meaningful to a peasant family in a Third World country that is being urged to adopt a preventive innovation like family planning.

It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas.

It disturbs me when Obama says in the State of the Union address that he wants to make dropping out of school at 18 illegal, because people learn differently and before there are forms of learning for every type of person in the world, we shouldn't be condemned for leaving.

Genius ... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one.

Utter originality is, of course, out of the question.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

The whole history of physics proves that a new discovery is quite likely lurking at the next decimal place.

If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.

We cannot be rooted in the past forever. We must not be sentimental.

A revolution does not have to eat its children. In fact, it is those who are in power who could very well initiate revolutions. Let us not be old-fashioned and think only of armed uprisings of minorities as revolutions. Any movement that seeks to overhaul established attitudes is a revolution.