Quotes About Innovation

What an individual does day to day on the job now must stretch across functional boundaries. Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market.

Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.

That's why Linux and Wikipedia and Firefox work.

a "grouplet"—a small, self-organized team that has almost no budget and even less authority, but that tries to change something within the company.

Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the "left brain" capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the capabilities we once disdained or thought frivolous—the "right-brain" qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning—increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

This era doesn't call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction.

Of course, other animals also respond to rewards and punishments, but only humans have proved able to channel this drive to develop everything from contract law to convenience stores.)

Montessori Schools. Dr. Maria Montessori developed the Montessori method of teaching in the early 1900s after observing children's natural curiosity and innate desire to learn.

innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best

inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.

The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it's in the arts, sciences, or business." TERESA AMABILE Professor, Harvard

about 48 percent of GE's software is developed in India.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work.9

Now, once a quarter, the company sets aside an entire day when its engineers can work on any software problem they want—only this time, "to get them out of the day to day," it must be something that's not part of their regular job.

Design—that is, utility enhanced by significance—has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success

Wikipedia represents the most powerful new business model of the twenty-first century: open source.

Indeed, one of design's most potent economic effects is this very capacity to create new markets—whether for ring tones, cutensils, photovoltaic cells, or medical devices.

Daniel H. Pink

Do the same for flawed design.

IDEO is one of the world's most respected design firms—the creator of everything from those fat-handled toothbrushes for kids to Apple Computer's first mouse to the Palm V. How do they do it? The secret would make an MBA squirm: Empathy. In the IDEO universe, great design doesn't begin with a cool drawing or a nifty gadget. It begins with a deep and empathic understanding of people.

Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.

Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left brains.

In those situations, the ability to move others hinges less on problem solving than on problem finding.

In the mid-1960s, two soon-to-be-legendary University of Chicago social scientists—Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—began studying the elusive subject of creativity.