Quotes About Innovation

Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen.

is the ceding of technical and scientific leadership to China. It is the innovation that never occurs, and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.

The way I solve a hard problem is not to start with the conventional wisdom, but to start over.

I've always felt ideas were a dime a dozen," he said. "If you had one that didn't work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.

As yet, there is no final reckoning of the wealth the Valley has created. Hundreds of billions of dollars, certainly; perhaps even trillions. In any case, 'The greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,' as one local capitalist puts it. The

An engineer's idea of a joke is a practical joke, perhaps because a practical joke, unlike the less practical kind, needs to be designed. It requires the jokester to build the contraption to ensnare his victim.

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.

She'd heard a line once that still resonated with her: The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea.

there is no name for what he's looking for, which, typically, is a technology, or an idea, on the cusp of commercial viability. The new new thing.

The best computer science students at Stanford were some of the best computer science students anywhere. Under Clark they gathered together into a new, potent force. 'The difference was phenomenal, for me. I don't know how many people around me noticed. But my God I noticed. The first manifestation was when all of these people started coming up and wanting to be part of my project.' That

It's the idea that is a tiny push away from general acceptance and, when it gets that push, will change the world. The

In 1872, the average American farmer fed roughly four other people; now the average farmer feeds about 155 other people.

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

The man who groped for the new new thing was in many ways ill suited for mainstream business.

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It

Clark had invented the technology, bet his career on it, and been right. He had attracted the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley to his company, and they in turn created the most talented computers.

The sensors measured everything that Clark could think to measure, including the pressure on the engine. They passed these measurements up to the programmable logic controllers. The

genomic sequencing

You didn't need to raise millions to build your product and in the process whittle your stake down to almost nothing. You found the concept, you wrote the software to exploit the concept, you sold the company to the public.

I'm sure in some way the neurosystem will one day be integrated with the computer," said Clark.

nurse at a VA hospital in Topeka, Kansas, had the bright idea of using bar codes on patients and medications to match them up

The metaphor that Romer used to describe the economy to noneconomists was of a well-stocked kitchen waiting for a brilliant chef to exploit it. Everyone in the kitchen starts with more or less the same ingredients, the metaphor ran, but not everyone produces good food. And only a very few people who wander into the kitchen find entirely new ways to combine old ingredients into delightfully tasty recipes. These people were the wealth creators.

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.