Quotes About Innovation

benefits from volatility and variability.

An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly

Just as a little bit of fire here and there gets rid of the flammable material in a forest, a little bit of harm here and there in an economy weeds out the vulnerable firms early enough to allow them to "fail early" (so they can start again) and minimize the long-term damage to the system.

Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets.

Ele percebeu que algumas coisas precisam se quebrar para que o sistema se aperfeiçoe — o que é denominado de destruição criativa —, uma noção desenvolvida, entre muitos outros, pelo filósofo Karl Marx, e um conceito descoberto, como mostraremos no capítulo 17, por Nietzsche.

The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even dreamed of at the time. It was a typical "solution looking for a problem.

I was told that a scientist managed the company and that he had the instinct, as a scientist, to just let scientists look wherever their instinct took them. Commercialization came later.

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps.

hackers make systems stronger.

It struck me how lacking in imagination we are:

We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things look like.

The story of the wheel itself is even more humbling than that of the suitcase:

While I accept the notion of epistemic base, what I question is the role it has really played in the history of technology.

But it took the Industrial Revolution for us to discover this earlier discovery.

If you are a Stone Age historical thinker called on to predict the future in a comprehensive report for your chief tribal planner, you must project the invention of the wheel or you will miss pretty much all of the action. Now, if you can prophesy the invention of the wheel, you already know what a wheel looks like, and thus you already know how to build a wheel, so you are already on your way. The Black Swan needs to be predicted!

and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after their initial use.

Bricolage is a form of trial and error close to tweaking, trying to make do with what you've got by recycling pieces that would be otherwise wasted.

In fact the rest are already benefiting from the contribution of the minority.

Ricordate questa massima: non sto dicendo che le tecnologie non invecchiano, ma solo che le tecnologie che tendevano a invecchiare sono già morte.

On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our

But the technology is only trivial retrospectively—not prospectively.

If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic.

At the time of writing, most big recent successes (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google) were started by people with skin and soul in the game and grew organically—if they had recourse to funding, it was to expand or allow the managers to cash out; funding was not the prime source of creation. You don't create a firm by creating a firm; nor do you do science by doing science.

Le processus de la découverte (ou de l'innovation, ou du progrès technologique) dépend lui-même d'un bricolage antifragile, d'une brusque prise de risques plutôt que d'une culture formelle.