Quotes About Innovation

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction - creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically.

Storytelling has worked for 5000 years. It's not going to stop now just because we have blogs and tweets.

But this is also the vortex on which we have the option to turn pro. It is where we own our idea machine power.

Even if you aren't an expert, give yourself permission to be a producer. Produce!

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Picasso also says, "I am always doing things I can't do—that's how I get to do them.

Robots are the new middle class.

The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors.

Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a "thing," a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is.

thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important

innovation without discipline leads to disaster.

technology is important—you can't remain a laggard and hope to be great. But technology by itself is never a primary cause of either greatness or decline.

The envisioned future should be so exciting in its own right that it would continue to keep the organization motivated even if the leaders who set the goal disappeared.

Hewlett Packard Chairman Built Company by Design, Calculator by Chance.

This rare ability to manage continuity and change—requiring a consciously practiced discipline—is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.

To remain innovative, you've got to have people at all levels doing lots of experimenting, tinkering, and doing—creating the popcorn effect. How do you do this? How can you create the environment where this happens? There are three basic answers, which we shall now discuss in detail: Employ creative people Get out of their way Reward them for being innovative

if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.

Not only do you need to hire a few creative "misfits," you also need to tolerate their sometimes bizarre behavior. Some of the most creative people simply don't fit into typical well-behaved molds. They're often rebels, irritating and somewhat out of control.

Do all creative innovations come from weird people? No, of course not. In fact, some of the most creative people we know come in fairly conservative packages. Yet, to have an innovative company, it's also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.

The same thing happens in business. When people become fat with conventional wisdom, they're dangerous. A lot of being innovative in business is being willing to give something a try because you don't know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. As Debi Colman, Apple VP of information systems and technology, puts it: "The single biggest roadblock to creativity and innovation I've encountered in business is conventional wisdom.

The evidence does not support the idea that you need an outside leader to come in and shake up the place to go from good to great. In fact, going for a high-profile outside change agent is negatively correlated with a sustained transformation from good to great.

Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not.

the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.