Quotes About Innovation

Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31

The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Apple's "Think Different" commercial, 1997

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.

There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone's look and feel. That was the context for Jobs's pronouncement that Google's "Don't be evil" slogan was "bullshit.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don't know how it works. They don't fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination."8

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan bootlegs," Kottke recalled. "He was both really cool and high-tech.

The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.

Lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business. You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis.

Wozniak would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

how the ability to make connections across disciplines—arts and sciences, humanities and technology—is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. "The smell and behavior wasn't an issue with

In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches and even romance.

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This was true of every era of creative ferment. The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution all had their institutions for collaborative work and their networks for sharing ideas.

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance.

It made it clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the elegance of a Macintosh.

Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of his old house.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of "trends" that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."60