Quotes About Innovation

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

The tractor's arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.

We long ago gave up the wish to have things that were adequate or even excellent; we have preferred instead to have things that were up-to-date.

There are two or three things that we haven't been able to confront or even acknowledge politically. One is that the aim of the Industrial Revolution from year one has been to replace people with technology. So it's a little contemptible to hear these people express in surprise at this late date that we have an unemployment problem.

We haven't accepted—we can't really believe—that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

T. S. Eliot, who remarked in one of his essays that immature poets imitate, mature poets steal).

While they mixed explosive chemicals, drew sparks from electrical charges and forged steam engines, Day was meddling with the human mind. Even in the so-called age of experiments, this was an experiment to top the lot

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

Don't look for the state of the art most expensive cameras. You should be capable today with fairly simple equipment of high caliber. You can edit on your own laptop, and you can make a film yourself for, let's say, even a feature film under $10,000. Learn from the documentary film school. Really didn't have any equipment or any money.

But why is laughter so creative? It reacts to contradiction with delight is why, thus opening the road to new discoveries.

Walt had done something new, something big, just as he always hoped he would. And it was just the beginning.

My contention is that especially young, recently trained engineers are in a position to recognize and to react on a presumptive anomaly: They are trained within the technological frame but have low enough inclusion to question the basic assumptions of that frame.

Successful system builders cannot work with a rigid demarcation between the system and the environment in which the system develops. They continuously seek to mold that environment so that the growth of the system is facilitated, often incorporating what was previously environment into the system, as happened when electrical supply companies came to control the regulative agencies set up to police them.

When the social groups involved in designing and using technology decide that a problem is solved, they stabilize the technology. The result is closure. Closure and stabilization, however, are not isolated events; they occur repeatedly during technological development. To

Pinch, Bijker, and Hughes note that inclusion in a group, organization, or bureaucracy dampens the originality of inventors and innovators (Bijker, this volume). High inclusion brings mission orientation or commitment to incremental improvements in the evolving technological system with which the group, organization, or bureaucracy has identified. The

a machine cannot be understood aside from its end-user and the cultural ambience in which it works. The role of the end-user is to insert that part of the iceberg of cultural knowledge that cannot be programmed. Progress

Explanations of the stability of technologies must take account of the social relations of work as

chariots that I would design with

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.

By imagination and reason we turn experience into foresight; we become the creators of our future, and cease to be the slaves of our past.