Quotes About Innovation

Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.

in many cases these addictive properties of new technologies are not accidents, but instead carefully engineered design features.

The Innovators, Isaacson later

First Facebook, then the iPhone: compulsive communicating and connecting—supported by mysterious, almost magical innovations in radio modulation and fiber-optic routing—swept our culture before anyone had the presence of mind to step back and re-ask Thoreau's fundamental question: To what end?

Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

In addition, the more unusual or creative your system, the better. This will reduce tedium, inject some novelty into the process, and lead to the establishment of stronger mental connections.

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

In MIT lore, it's generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades.

This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a hub-and-spoke architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported.

We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-and-spoke-style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter.

Great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects- little bets- to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea.

To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

The goal of the machine," David explained, "is to create a setting where the users can get into a state of deep human flourishing—creating work that's at the absolute extent of their personal abilities." It

The complex reality of the technologies that real companies leverage to get ahead emphasizes the absurdity of the now common idea that exposure to simplistic, consumer-facing products—especially in schools—somehow prepares people to succeed in a high-tech economy. Giving students iPads or allowing them to film homework assignments on YouTube prepares them for a high-tech economy about as much as playing with Hot Wheels would prepare them to thrive as auto mechanics.

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we've painstakingly adapted over millennia.

We no longer see Internet tools as products released by for-profit companies, funded by investors hoping to make a return, and run by twentysomethings who are often making things up as they go along. We're instead quick to idolize these digital doodads as a signifier of progress and a harbinger of a (dare I say, brave) new world.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "Think Weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can't stand tourist attractions, don't sit on the beach unless there's a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don't care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

Google is the second most valuable company in the United States, with a market cap of over $800 billion. Facebook, which had fewer than a million users ten years ago, now has over two billion and is the fifth most valuable company in the US, with a market cap of over $500 billion. ExxonMobil, by contrast, is currently worth around $370 billion. Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.

The important thing about little bets is that they're bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

Much in the same way that the "innovation" of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

answering machine tape, Kirk took another modest step by launching The Armchair Archaeologist project with no real vision of how it would prove useful, other than perhaps as fodder for his intro archaeology courses. This final little step, however, turned out to be a winner, leading directly to his own television show.

No one ever changed the world, created a new industry, or amassed a fortune due to their fast email response time.