Quotes About Innovation

A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.

It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

He walks through social barriers and taboos as if they were cobwebs.

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.

Someday, people will be buying these in antique shops, and they'll have tiny computers that they carry around with them"—which I think he probably meant as a joke, except he didn't laugh.

Often, for me, the best ideas come out of extreme situations in unknown terrain, whether in cycling or in business. Pushing beyond what I think I can do creates an opening for new ideas.

Successful entrepreneurs take who they are and what they already know and create surprising combinations.

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.

Unfortunately, the

Near the end of his tenure as co-CEO of SAP, Jim Hagemann Snabe discovered that the German software giant had amassed more than fifty thousand key performance indicators (KPIs), covering every job across the company. Snabe was horrified. "We were trying to run the company by remote control," he recalls. "We had all this amazing talent, but had asked them to put their brains on ice.

Put simply, hyper-rational executives produce hyper-boring products.

How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can't requisition a $ 300 office chair without a manager's approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we'd realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual's freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.

Yet "change management," like "Scottish cuisine" and "man bun," is an oxymoron.

We live in a world of accelerating change, where the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. Change is unrelenting, pitiless, and occasionally shocking.

Only 11 percent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1955 are on the list today The average age of a company on the S&P 500 Index has fallen from sixty years in the 1950s to less than twenty years currently

the world is becoming more turbulent faster than most companies are becoming more adaptable.

Given these dynamics, companies that fall behind tend to stay there.

As you'd expect of a company built to encourage creative problem-solving, Nucor is highly decentralized. In essence, the company is a confederation of seventy-five divisions that operate independently but compete collectively.

a capacity for innovation is the hallmark of our species. Each of us was born to create—whether it's landscaping a garden, writing a blog, composing a photograph, inventing a recipe, developing an app, or starting a business.

You were put on this earth to do something significant, heroic even, and what could be more heroic than creating, at long last, organizations that are fully human?

How, exactly, do the archetypical features of bureaucracy—stratified decision rights, formalized unit boundaries, specialized roles, and standardized practices—undermine adaptability, innovation, and engagement?

Bringing the ATLAS detector to life required tons of leadership and creativity. What it didn't require was a pyramid. No one within the ATLAS consortium had the power to give an order. Everyone was a colleague and no one was a boss. Despite this, the ATLAS detector was completed on time and within budget.

In a formal hierarchy, the power to initiate change tends to be concentrated at the top. Major pivots require a top-level sign-off. The problem is, by the time an issue is big enough to capture the CEO's scarce attention, the organization is already playing catch-up. Leaders are insulated—organizationally, culturally, and geographically—from the fringes where new trends take shape.