Quotes About Innovation

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace BY RICARDO SEMLER

While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people "boundary crossers." They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience.

the R-Directed aptitudes so often disdained and dismissed—artistry, empathy, taking the long view, pursuing the transcendent—will increasingly determine who soars and who stumbles. It's a dizzying—but ultimately inspiring—change.

generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains."2 The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice.

Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems.

Boundary crossers reject either/or choices and seek multiple options and blended solutions. They lead hyphenated lives filled with hyphenated jobs and enlivened by hyphenated identities.

Sudbury Valley School. Take a look at this independent school in Framingham, Massachusetts

They have an intuitive sense of what I call the "Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation": sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite.

The Tinkering School. More of a lab than a school, this summer program, created by computer scientist Gever Tulley, lets children from seven to seventeen play around with interesting stuff and build cool things.

Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways.

in a time of abundance, when the largest rewards go to those who can devise novel and compelling creations, metaphor-making is vital.

Results-only work environment (ROWE): The brainchild of two American consultants, a ROWE is a workplace in which employees don't have schedules. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time or any time. They just have to get their work done.

If one person embodies this approach to work and life—the apex predator of the anticipated regret food chain—that person is Jeff Bezos. He's one of the richest people in the world, thanks to founding Amazon, one of the largest companies on the planet. He owns The Washington Post. He visits outer space. Yet in the domain of our most misunderstood emotion, he is best known for a concept that he calls the "Regret Minimization Framework.

When you are playful, you are activating the right side of your brain. The logical brain is a limited brain. The right side is unlimited. You can be anything you want.

Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, which holds, in part: "Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity."11

To reprise language from the previous chapter, the solution isn't algorithmic (following a set path) but heuristic (breaking from the path to discover a novel strategy).

Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living in much of the developed world that would have been unfathomable to our great-grandparents.

Type I" behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounded in the real science of human motivation and powered by our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is a legend one day and a laggard the next. Retail video rental is a cash cow—until Netflix carves the industry into flank steak. All the while, the business cycle itself swooshes without much warning from unsustainable highs to unbearable lows like some satanic roller coaster.

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote." TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO

Identifying problems as a way to move others takes two

If you want a creative life, do what you can't and experience the beauty of the mistakes you make.

ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic motivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation