Quotes About Innovation

They all knew they were expected to be deferential to Jobs while also pushing back on his ideas and being willing to argue—a tricky balance to maintain, but each did it well. "I realized very early that if you didn't voice your opinion, he would mow you down," said Cook. "He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing, then you'll never survive.

Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers were devising.

I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer," he said. "The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they're out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better."12

It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

Leonardo's initial anatomy studies of 1489 focused on human skulls. He started with a skull that had been sawed in half, top to bottom (fig. 60). Then the front of the left half was sawed off. His groundbreaking technique of drawing the two halves together made it easy to see how the inner cavities were positioned relative to the face. For example, the frontal sinus, which Leonardo is the first person to correctly depict, is shown to rest just behind the eyebrow.

Florence flourished in the fifteenth century because it was comfortable with such people. Above all, Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

The combination of GNU and Linux created an operating system that has been ported to more hardware platforms, ranging from the world's ten biggest supercomputers to embedded systems in mobile phones, than any other operating system.

La innovación se produce por fases. En el caso del transistor, primero fue la invención, liderada por Shockley, Bardeen y Brattain; después la producción, encabezada por ingenieros como Teal, y por último, e igualmente importante, fueron los emprendedores quienes encontraron la forma de crear nuevos mercados. Pat Haggerty, el intrépido jefe de Teal, constituía un llamativo caso práctico de este tercer paso en el proceso de la innovación.

NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler declared that "nature loves simplicity and unity." So did Steve Jobs.

It should not be hard for you to look at stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or the clouds, or mud, and if you consider them well you will find marvelous new ideas, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things.9

Having a healthy disregard for the impossible

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?

Las personas lo suficientemente locas como para pensar que pueden cambiar el mundo son las que lo cambian. (Anuncio Piensa diferente de Apple, 1997)

Leibniz had little engineering skill and did not surround himself with those who did. So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he was unable to produce reliably working versions of his device.

Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.

It was the first time in history," Wozniak later said, "anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them.

Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

his thirties or forties able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty. That held true for Jobs in his thirties, during the decade that began with his ouster from Apple in 1985. But after turning forty in 1995, he flourished.

ought to go ahead and do it," he said. He argued that if he joined Apple full-time, he would not have to go into management or give up being an engineer. "That was exactly what I needed to hear," Wozniak later said. "I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart