Quotes About Innovation

I was always of the opinion that progress made things easier. But it don't look that way to me. If anything, things seem more complicated. Is that the whole idea of progress - to complicate matters?

Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up

AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies . . . once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer.

We pay attention to what our competitors do but it's not where we put our energy.

Amazon isn't happening to the book business," he likes to say to authors and journalists. "The future is happening to the book business.")

Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." —Alan Kay

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

It's about a crucial era during which old regimes fell, new leaders emerged, new social contracts were forged between strangers, the topography of cities changed, and the upstarts roamed the earth.

If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you've got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.

In the copy he brought to Kathryn Dalzell, he had underlined one particular passage in which Walton described borrowing the best ideas of his competitors. Bezos's point was that every company in retail stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before it.

the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them.

I didn't know Jeff Bezos but I just remember being blown away by the fact that he was there with his sleeves rolled up, climbing around the conveyors with all of us,

There is so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the Internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way. Jeff Bezos

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It's an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few years later. "We didn't want to be Kodak." The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn't bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.

Nevertheless, Blecharczyk came through with a new version of a site on March 3, a week before the annual conference in Austin, Texas. The new slogan was "A friend, not a front desk.

We don't have a single big advantage," he once told an old adversary, publisher Tim O'Reilly, back when they were arguing over Amazon protecting its patented 1-Click ordering method from rivals like Barnes & Noble. "So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.

Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures,

But then he offered this: 'The things that people are going to feel are still to come. The kind of impact this is going to have on our cities -ninety-five or ninety-eight percent of it is still yet to happen. What if I said there's still going to be no traffic in any major city in the U.S. in five years?

great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses

Let's give them credit," Schmidt says. "The book guys got computer science, they figured out the analytics, and they built something significant.