Quotes About Innovation

the idea of using infinity to solve difficult geometry problems has to rank as one of the best ideas anyone ever had.

Creation is intuitive; reason comes later.

and out comes another empirical truth, possibly a new one, a fact about the universe that nobody knew before (like the existence of electromagnetic waves).

Cubism Meets Calculus

What I'm trying to say is that his calculation of ? was heroic, both logically and arithmetically. By using a 96-gon inside the circle and a 96-gon outside the circle, he ultimately proved that ? is greater than 3 + 10/71 and less than 3 + 10/70.

Boredom is the laboratory where new enthusiasms prepare themselves,

Zen is perhaps best known not so much for the negation of speech, which would represent an extreme view, but for inventing a creative new style of expression that uses language in unusual and ingenious fashions to surpass a reliance on everyday words and letters.

The Death of Trade Unionism, and toward the Birth of a Labor 3.0,

Culture is the multigenerational hard-drive of memory, change, and innovation. Culture transforms a record of the past into a prediction of the future; it transforms memory into tradition — into rules of how to proceed. And culture is profoundly social. It exists not just in one mind, but binds together mobs of minds in a common enterprise.

GPS on the molecular level.

her iPhone in the bowl so the sound would be amplified—pretty much the cheapest speaker system

Go ahead and break the rules, flip expectations, twist the story world around backwards—as long as it's in the service of your readers.

And technology is a clock you cannot turn backward.

Nonetheless, you can start trying out generics and extended for loops today.

Chance favors the connected mind.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

When you don't have to ask for permission innovation thrives.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.

the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.