Quotes About Innovation

The coronavirus crisis demonstrated the degree to which digitalization has become a competitor with transportation, using electrons to connect people rather than molecules to move them.

DARPA—the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers riding in tanks and trucks were being maimed and killed by IEDs. In response, the Defense Department was determined to develop vehicles that would not need drivers—what would become known as autonomous vehicles.

the first Grand Challenge, held in 2004, was a flop. The best that any vehicle could manage was just 7.5 miles on the 142-mile course in the rugged desert on the California-Nevada border. Yet this failure was also a success. "The first competition created a community of innovators, engineers, students, programmers, off-road racers, backyard mechanics, inventors, and dreamers," said a DARPA official. "The fresh thinking they brought was the spark.

an entrepreneur from a small North Carolina town once known as Shoe Heel. Yet Malcom McLean, otherwise known as "Idea-a-Minute" McLean, is one of the most consequential figures in the history of transportation.

Starting off with a tiny trucking company that he built into a major enterprise, McLean went on to unleash the container revolution in world shipping that is the foundation of today's global economy.

On April 26, 1956, cranes at the port of Newark, New Jersey, lifted up fifty-eight truck bodies, minus their wheels and cabins, and put them on a surplus World War II tanker bound for Texas. "We are convinced that we have found a way to combine the economy of water transportation with the speed and flexibility of overland shipment," McLean announced.

His next step was to detour ships on their way back from Vietnam, now empty of cargo, to Japan to pick up containers filled with inexpensive goods destined for U.S. customers. Manufacturers in the Asian "tigers"—South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—followed suit. It was the spread of this innovation, and the networks and system that implemented it, that integrated East Asia into the world economy.

No new car company had been started in the United States since 1925.

In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle.

two things killed that first generation of electric cars. One was Henry Ford's Model T and the mass production of the assembly line. The other, though less well known, was the electric starter, invented by Charles Kettering in 1911 for Cadillac after a person died from cranking a car. Kettering's invention eliminated the need for someone to stand in front and crank. Over the next several years, electric cars faded away.

The lithium-ion battery was first invented in an Exxon laboratory in the mid-1970s, during a time when it was thought that the world would run out of oil and Exxon would need to find another way to stay in the mobility business.

Together, shale oil and shale gas have proven to be the biggest energy innovations so far in the twenty-first century. Wind and solar are both innovations of the 1970s and 1980s, though they came into their own only over the last decade. The United States has surged ahead of Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world's number one producer of both oil and gas, and is now one of the world's major exporters of both.

the Bolt rolled into showrooms in December 2016, beating Tesla by seven months with a moderately priced model that could go two hundred miles on a single charge.

While millions of miles have now been driven by test driverless cars, humans drive more than eight billion miles every day in the United States.

By the end of that drilling program, they had the proof. Devon's engineers had successfully yoked together the two technologies—slick water fracturing with horizontal drilling—to liberate natural gas imprisoned in the shale. "The rest was history," Nichols would later say.

new era" for Volkswagen.12 The company announced that it would launch at least seventy-five all-electric vehicles by 2028. "The future belongs to electric drive," said Diess. "Without EVs, we can't win the battle against climate change." He also pledged that the company would become "carbon neutral across the whole supply chain.

The search for "better cab" was not limited to the United States. Cheng Wei, an engineer at the Chinese tech giant Alibaba, missed several flights in China because of his failure to get a taxi in time. Fed up, in 2012 he founded DiDi, which means "beep beep" in Chinese. Now called DiDi Chuxing after a merger, it has become the largest ride-hailing company in the world.

The new technique needed a name. They didn't want to just call it "water fracking." That would have been too prosaic, even boring. So they called it "slick water fracturing.

Education is the key to the future: You've heard it a million times, and it's not wrong. Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates, and better-educated countries grow faster and innovate more than other countries. But going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects.

Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

As technology increasingly takes over knowledge-based work, the cognitive skills that are central to today's education systems will remain important; but behavioral and non-cognitive skills necessary for collaboration, innovation, and problem solving will become essential as well.

Failure is not fatal, but failing to change might be.

Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before.