Quotes About Innovation

Seven hundred new antibacterial products were launched in the United States between 1992 and 1998. One of them was the "oral-care strip," pieces of anti-microbial tape designed to be stuck to the tongue.

groundbreaking, earth-shattering invention.

I do like change. That's the one thing exciting about me.

A weird artifact of the past, aiming at the future. An intrusive, constructive contradiction.

It could be that the best thing is something different from what you expect.

Leonardo did not pursue science and engineering in order to dominate nature, as Francis Bacon would advocate a century later, but always tried to learn as much as possible from nature. He was in awe of the beauty he saw in the complexity of natural forms, patterns, and processes, and aware that nature's ingenuity was far superior to human design. Accordingly, he often used natural processes and structures as models for his own designs.

This exceptional ability to interconnect observations and ideas from different disciplines lies at the very heart of Leonardo's approach to learning and research.

Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish in the crowd.

There is nothing easier than lopping off heads and nothing harder than developing ideas.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

Highly creative people don't necessarily excel in raw brainpower. They are misfits on some level. They tend to question accepted views and to consider contradictory ones.

It was now the age of visualization, when abstract concepts as well as basic needs and wants were increasingly expressed in visual terms. From its origins as a number cruncher, the computer had gone Hollywood; it was now an image maker of vast power. Thus, graphics in many ways defined the look and feel of computing. Cutler

Code writers, like engineers generally, tend to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant conundrums.

The harbinger of a revolution, the Altair was the first mass-marketed personal computer. For the first time a computer was dedicated not just to a single task but to one person. The old guard of computing entirely missed the significance of this.

It wasn't until five years after the first 360 hardware was introduced in 1964 that all of its software ran well. By then, IBM had spent nearly as much writing the software as designing the hardware. This astonished the company's managers and vividly highlighted "the greatest impediment to advances in computer technology," the problem of managing large software projects. At

Muglia insisted that a computer program, while certainly inspired and created by code writers, must reflect the currents of the market and the desires of customers. No great program was created by slavishly following the market or crudely regurgitating the requests of shoppers. But creators lived in a cocoon. The very demands of their craft made it hard to step outside the bounds of their imaginations. Muglia

One team member, who had formerly worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, recalled only writing specifications for prototype products during his entire time with the company. Invariably after finishing the specs, the project was cancelled. Coming away empty handed so often made him feel sad. After

In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three." Cutler

Poor performance was a common failing of most new programs. The annals of software amply showed this; nearly every landmark system, from IBM's 360 to the various flavors of Unix to Microsoft's Windows, was released in an immature state and evolved over time to win broader acceptance. Indeed, people expected the first commercial release of a new program to contain flaws of all sorts.

Better to release the first version sooner with less. His was a less-now, more-later ethic. Robert

The programmer seemed to be a throwback to an earlier age of handicrafts, when each maker put a distinctive stamp on what were functionally the same products. Well rewarded, the programmer's work was judged harshly.

By the summer of 1988, Bill Gates was the leading representative of a new breed of tycoon: the software superrich. Just as oil created a kind of royalty in the last century, "wildcat" programmers had emerged among the wealthiest self-made men in America. Paul Allen, who had left Microsoft because of illness, was worth megamillions. So were the founders of other leading software companies. At the age of thirty-three, Gates was the youngest billionaire in the United States.

Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.