Quotes About Innovation

Over the years, 3M has had a policy that at least 25% of its revenue should come from products introduced within the last five years. That encourages small new ventures, which in turn offer hundreds of opportunities to test and stretch young people with leadership potential.

Process Lessons • Tight controls strangle innovation. The planning, budgeting, and reviews applied to existing businesses will squeeze the life out of an innovation effort. • Companies should expect deviations from plan: If employees are rewarded simply for doing what they committed to do, rather than acting as circumstances would suggest, their employers will stifle and drive out innovation.

While loosening formal controls, companies should tighten interpersonal connections between innovation efforts and the rest of the business.

The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that somehow bridges the hostilities—a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Granted, such an arrangement seems, at first glance, improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation itself.

they are transforming their organizations into armies of killer apps and crunching their way to victory.

Don't equate activity with efficiency. You are paying your key people to see the big picture. Don't let them get bogged down in a lot of meaningless meetings and paper shuffling. Announce a Friday afternoon off once in a while. Cancel a Monday morning meeting or two. Tell the cast of characters you'd like them to spend the amount of time normally spent preparing for attending the meeting at their desks, simply thinking about an original idea.

on the future of hand-drawn animation] I'm actually not that worried. I wouldn't give up on it completely. Once in a while there are strange, rich people who like to invest in odd things. You're going to have people in the corners of garages making cartoons to please themselves. And I'm more interested in those people than I am in big business.

In our work, the question is, how much you absorb from others. So for me, creativity, is really like a relay race. As children we are handed a baton. Rather than passing it onto the next generation as is, first we need to digest it and make it our own.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

I have a strong desire to be liberated from being tied down to reality.

No puedo quedarme sentado en mi escritorio. Las ideas vienen de lo inesperado.

inspiration unlocks the future

If I were asked my view, in a nutshell, of what animation is, I would say it is what ever I want to create.

Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.

and he has never given up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door into Summer. You know, I think he is right.

Despite the crapehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

If you just check all the doors, one of them is bound to be the Door Into Summer.

Durch die Eisenbahn wird Raum getötet, und es bleibt nur noch die Zeit übrig.

Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why?

this sort of, arrogant individualism which imagines each new generation can somehow create the world afresh.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.

I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!