Quotes About Innovation

Within a single information network, processes of collective learning may be more or less powerful in different regions; it is thus possible to imagine regions in which more information is pooled, in greater variety and in greater concentrations, than in other regions. These arguments suggest a useful general principle: the size, diversity, and efficiency of information networks should be an important large-scale determinant of rates of ecological innovation.

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.

It was possible to borrow British technology, and increasingly governments began to promote development. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments and large banks were actively managing industrial change.

A device that sits somewhere between the categories of "possible general method" and "for emergency use only / you're going to die method" is the Reverso.

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.

I have nothing against sperm banks, but they should really get rid of those automatic teller machines.

You never asked!" So many companies struggle with R&D because technology and marketing folks don't communicate. This was certainly the case at Honeywell. To address the problem, we mandated that technologists and marketers collaborate closely on R&D projects from the very beginning. We also created a company-wide, annual event, our Tech Symposium, that convened hundreds of technologists and marketing executives from around the world to collaborate and network.

Looking back, video game design seems a natural fit, although there was no such thing when I was growing up. I built a Tic-Tac-Toe playing machine in my teens which went up in smoke on the night it was scheduled to go to a science fair.

Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe. I'm rather sure of that.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

Long live the New Flesh!

Or was it a more sinister thing? Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self—garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

Was the iPhone a malevolent protean organism, the stem-cell phone, mocking him who had cameras with real physical shutters whose sound you couldn't turn off? Promising to replace every other device on earth with its shape-shifting self – garage door openers, solar timers, television remotes, car keys, guitar tuners, GPS modules, light meters, spirit levels, you name it?

We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What

An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism.

If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This

We know that achieving arbitrary physical transformations that are not forbidden by the laws of physics (such as replanting a forest) can only be a matter of knowing how. We know that finding out how is a matter of seeking good explanations.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good