Quotes About Innovation

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

Write an Action Plan

We cannot yet develop a theory of innovation. But we already know enough to say when, where, and how one looks systematically for innovative opportunities, and how one judges the chances for their success or the risks of their failure. We know enough to develop, though still only in outline form, the practice of innovation.

Exploiting opportunities produces results.

Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work - on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself - it must be organized for constant change. It must be organized for innovation.

Its five business principles are "respect for humans," "customer satisfaction," "social responsibility," "value creation," and "innovation orientation.

But the order in which these sources will be discussed is not arbitrary. They are listed in descending order of reliability and predictability. For, contrary to almost universal belief, new knowledge – and especially new scientific knowledge – is not the most reliable or most predictable source of successful innovations. For all the visibility, glamour, and importance of science-based innovation, it is actually the least reliable and least predictable one.

Technology" does not necessarily mean "science and engineering." Techne, the Greek word from which "technology" derives, means, after all, "useful knowledge," or "organized skill," rather than "engineering.

Resist the temptation to redesign seats on the bus to specific personalities (except for the exceptionally rare genius)

No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation than the unexpected success. In no other area are innovative opportunities less risky and their pursuit less arduous. Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

They found that when ideas could be criticized, the group generated more ideas and they were more creative than when either the person could be criticized or even when there was no evaluation at all.

Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That

When the cadres banned his students from singing any actual Christmas carols in a stage version of ''A Christmas Carol,'' he had them substitute patriotic Communist songs -- which actually improved Dickens: ''My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out 'The East Is Red,' singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, 'Humbug!

I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of non-ferrous metal... Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

Normal is the enemy of interesting.

Code is FLUFFY AND FIERCE.

A problem is merely a solution waiting to be found.

My advice for the next decade: Keep on the lookout for tomorrow's big baggers. You're likely to find one.

The combination of new equipment and new chemicals turned the American farm into the most efficient food bank on earth, capable of producing more wheat, corn, and so forth, per acre than any other country's farms in the history of agriculture.

There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come," said Victor Hugo

The committed person doesn't play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules.

Shared vision fosters risk taking and experimentation. When people are immersed in a vision, they often don't know how to do it. They run an experiment. They change direction and run another experiment. Everything is an experiment, but there is no ambiguity.