Quotes About Innovation

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.

No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.

There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.

Nevertheless, the number of farmers, small as well as large, who are adopting the new seeds and new technology is increasing very rapidly, and the increase in numbers during the past three years has been phenomenal.

I never finished the 'Large Glass' because, after working on it for eight years, I probably got interested in something else; also, I was tired. It may be that, subconsciously, I never intended to finish it because the word 'finish' implies an acceptance of traditional methods and all the paraphernalia that accompany them.

For years I have really wanted to create my own special dining experience that people never forget.

Baseball people, and that includes myself, are slow to change and accept new ideas. I remember that it took years to persuade them to put numbers on uniforms.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all would prosper.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can't offer an interesting perspective on.

We didn't expect it to be cool, with people trading URLs instead of phone numbers.

You can't allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There's a need to respect the past, but it's a mistake to revere your past.

At the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, we have long had a tradition of close cooperation between physicists and technicians.

As beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration.

All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.

Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new forms of probability.

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

When you talk about change, you know what makes it really tough for people is on the one hand you've got tradition, and on the other hand you've got change; in many people's mind, change equals modernization. Tradition, however. I'm a big tradition guy.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

I became a fashion designer to make clothes for the people, not to be a top couturier in the French tradition.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.