Quotes About Innovation

Certain of the engineers now entered what West called "the first off-the-wall period." A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure, in which you travel by computer into an underground world, wandering through strange, awful labyrinths, searching for treasure that's guarded and sometimes snatched away by dragons, dwarfs, trolls and a rapacious pirate who mutters: "Har. Har.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes.

Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies.

Whether you want to build a mansion to live in, a row of stores to make customers happy, a game that visitors have to learn to beat, your own mystery island or more; you can create just about anything when you

Restricting knowledge slows the pace of development.

Hui Shi was set on using the calabash to hold water, never thinking that he could use water to hold the calabash.

The poet John Ciardi pointed out, "Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.

It's becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.

apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953...The wonders portrayed in THE JETSONS, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass...Life is better and we have more stuff, but the pace of change has slowed down compared to what people saw two or three generations ago.

If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don't work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.

As chain stores rise, there is also a loss of dynamism, competition, and market entry for new ideas and products. Keep in mind that today's major chain was once a small individual store on a street somewhere. A bit more economic chaos, even if it is inconvenient in the short run, actually tends to be correlated with higher rates of innovation.

All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form—some of which are valid—pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues. First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs. The two words that follow most immediately from the world of business are "prosperity" and "opportunity.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.

Machines, he said, are an effect of art, which is nature's ape, and they reproduce not its forms but the operation itself.

we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved

When nature fails, we turn to art.

A daily newspaper is destined to become like a weekly magazine. We'll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions...

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon

Never trust originality.