Quotes About Innovation

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

It was down to me—not George Martin, not anyone else—to turn the Beatles' new vision into a reality.

the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.

wash our clothes by beating them with our heads.

It turns out, to disrupt someone else's business, you have to add a net new line of business to your own portfolio. This

They will work with vendors who have little or no funding, with products that start life as little more than a diagram on a whiteboard, and with technology gurus who bear a disconcerting resemblance to Rasputin.

It turns out our attitude toward technology adoption becomes significant—at least in a marketing sense—any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on. In academic terms, such change-sensitive products are called discontinuous innovations. The contrasting term, continuous innovations, refers to the normal upgrading of products that does not require us to change behavior.

Technologies from a prior era, once the focal point of innovation, now become the scaffolding upon which next-generation innovation will build.

existing ones. At the same time, it needs to separate its revenue performance activities from its enabling investments, focusing the former on delivering results based on what the latter have helped to seed and till. As the following diagram indicates, these two divisions result in four zones of management activity, each aligned with one, and only one, investment horizon, each demanding a different style of leadership to achieve those ends.

The competition takes place at the level of corporate agenda, not at the level of competing products. That

Pioneers are people with arrows in their backs")

Make something 10 people completely love, not something most people think is pretty good.

The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary focuses on value not from a system's technology per se but rather from the strategic leap forward such technology can enable.

Marketing falls prey to the crack between the technology enthusiast and the visionary by failing to discover, or at least failing to articulate, the compelling application that provides the order-of-magnitude leap in benefits. A

Now if we map the three horizons onto the Growth/Materiality Matrix, we can see how they intersect with portfolio management (see Figure 2.5).

This material focuses primarily on marketing, because that is where the leadership must come from

there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even

Chasm crossing is not the end, but rather the beginning, of mainstream market development.

the company may be saying "state-of-the-art" when the pragmatist wants to hear "industry standard.

the key to getting beyond the enthusiasts and winning over a visionary is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.

Surround your disruptive core product, the thing that got you to the dance, with a whole product that solves for the target customer's problem end to end. That will keep you on the dance floor for a long time to come. The

Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, good fit with your crown jewels. If

To get an early market started requires an entrepreneurial company with a breakthrough technology product that enables a new and compelling application, a technology enthusiast who can evaluate and appreciate the superiority of the product over current alternatives, and a well-heeled visionary who can foresee an order-of-magnitude improvement from implementing the new application.

the real news is the deep and dividing chasm that separates the early adopters from the early majority. This is by far the most formidable and unforgiving transition in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and it is all the more dangerous because it typically goes unrecognized.