Quotes About Innovation

It's best to keep things as free and open as you can. It's good to have a template, but then you go back and dissect it and see where you can make improvements. That's pretty much been the case with every Priest song that's ever been written.

I would much rather hear a song that's written from a fresh perspective, using ideas that have existed in rock & roll for 50 years, than something that is incredibly abrasive to my ears but is new.

What I'm after is a composed music that will sound like improvised music when improvisors play it. You shouldn't be able to tell what parts are being improvised and what parts were written out beforehand; it should sound like the same music.

Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically.

Every single tune you know from the 1940s until the 1970s was written, arranged, and demoed in the Brill Building. OK, maybe not every song, but writers from Benny Goodman to Lieber & Stoller to Neil Diamond all kept offices there.

It seems inevitable that the magic of the written word will fade.

There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.

Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

It's important to have people who are absolutely willing to say you're wrong or who have a totally different perspective than you do on everything. Fresh ideas are hard to come by, and good ones are even harder.

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

I choose work that is hard to pull off. And it's scary how things can go wrong. But if there's no risk involved, it's not challenging. A good idea will survive any process.

There is some risk that if the wrong regulatory regime gets adopted in the U.S., then the center of innovation could move to other countries. If blockchains are the next Internet, that would be a very unfortunate development for the U.S.

I probably have the most fun thinking up original vehicles. I usually consider details such as how to get into them and where their engines are. When you draw a real-world car, you have to obtain some references. I'd hate to have someone point out that I'm wrong. But if it's something I invented, I can have it my way.

There's nothing wrong with going out and playing for the fans that have been with you forever. I get it. It looks like a lot of fun. But that's not the thing that drives me. I already did that, and I appreciate everything I got from it, but I want to do something new and fresh.

We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.

The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable.

I'm a total rink rat. I can do the toe loop, the lutz, a flip, and the Scholz. That's one I invented. It's like me - you jump, you rotate in the wrong direction, and you land on the wrong foot.