Quotes About Innovation

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

Without diffusion, fewer technologies are acquired, and more existing technologies are lost.

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

Only after about 20 years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music.

1) The availability of cheap slave labor in classical times supposedly discouraged innovation then, whereas high wages or labor scarcity now stimulate the search for technological solutions.

1885 did engines improve to the point that Gottfried Daimler got around to installing one on a bicycle to create the first motorcycle;

he waited until 1896 to build the first truck.

2) Patents and other property laws, protecting ownership rights of inventors, reward innovation in the modern West, while the lack of such protection discourages it in modern China.

Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.

Today the most numerous Native American tribe in the United States is the Navajo, who on European arrival were just one of several hundred tribes. But the Navajo proved especially resilient and able to deal selectively with innovation. They incorporated Western dyes into their weaving, became silversmiths and ranchers, and now drive trucks while continuing to live in traditional dwellings

Until around A.D. 1450, China was technologically much more innovative and advanced than Europe, even more so than medieval Islam. The long list of Chinese inventions includes canal lock gates, cast iron, deep drilling, efficient animal harnesses, gunpowder, kites, magnetic compasses, movable type, paper, porcelain, printing (except for the Phaistos disk), sternpost rudders, and wheelbarrows. China then ceased to be innovative for reasons about which we shall speculate in the Epilogue.

Thus, it is untrue that there are continents whose societies have tended to be innovative and continents whose societies have tended to be conservative. On any continent, at any given time, there are innovative societies and also conservative ones. In addition, receptivity to innovation fluctuates in time within the same region.

Inventors often have to persist at their tinkering for a long time in the absence of public demand, because early models perform too poorly to be useful.

Tasmanya'n?n Avrupal? kaÅŸiflerce MS 1642 y?l?nda ilk keÅŸfedildiÄŸi zamanki taÅŸ teknolojisi,Yukar? Avrupa'n?n on binlerce y?l önce Yontma TaÅŸ Ça??'ndaki teknolojisinden daha basitti.

One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.

Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.

Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.

technology was less advanced in western Europe than in any other "civilized" area of the Old World until the late Middle Ages.

For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier.

Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.