Quotes About Innovation

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.

William Gibson told only half the story: like the future, the past is also here in the present, and just as unevenly distributed.

The assumption – and I think it's correct – is that the technology is going to happen anyway, so the best thing is to get it distributed as quickly as possible and see what people use it for, and keep an eye out for any problems that arise.

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought.

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.

Logic takes you from A to B, but imagination takes you everywhere.

for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story.

Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don't look like burning-platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope.

Beware the soul-sucking force of reasonableness

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.

What's working and how can we do more of it?" That's the bright-spot philosophy in a single question.

You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a "best practice," it's no longer a competitive advantage for anyone.

Good metaphors are "generative."13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it.

It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.

British Medical Journal asked its readers to vote on the most important medical milestone that had occurred since 1840, when the BMJ was first published. Third place went to anesthesia, second place to antibiotics. The winner was one you might not have expected: the "sanitary revolution," encompassing sewage disposal and methods for securing clean water. Much of the world, though, is still waiting for that revolution to come.

if appropriate, add an element of surprise.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

But isn't the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we're not arguing that a "color by numbers" approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach? Actually, yes, that's exactly what we're saying.

Novelty even changes our perception of time.

It's as though the leaders aspire to create a complaint-free service rather than an extraordinary one.

Employees as cast members" is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for more than fifty years.