Quotes About Innovation

development at leading-edge software organizations, like JavaSoft, Microsoft, and Netscape. He called to chat with a

Corporation opened its doors in Mountain View, California. Four years later, Mosaic

incorporating, Mosaic Communications Corporation opened its doors in Mountain View, California. Four years later, Mosaic Communications had morphed into the half-billion-dollar Netscape Communications Corporation, the fastest-growing software company of all time. This chapter explores how

No corner of PARC generated anything like the Kay group's free-wheeling mania. "It was an amazingly seductive environment," recalled Merry. "I was there late at night all the time. People were so full of ideas and excitement, and of course everybody knew more than anybody else about how the world was supposed to be.

Taylor believed that the unique success of the 914 copier had inculcated Xerox management with the doctrine that good things derived only from hardware. He was determined to show them that this idea was obsolete. As PARC envisioned the office of the future, a single piece of equipment could be made to serve multiple uses simply by changes in its software.

The transformation of America that took place during the post-World War II period really began a decade earlier, with the completion of Hoover Dam. The story of America in the last half of the twentieth century is the story not of the postwar era, but the post-dam era.

I had spent my life in the river bottoms and Boulder meant a wonderful climax," Crowe recalled in 1943. "I was wild to build this dam." So, too, were the founders of Six Companies, Inc., the unwieldy contracting consortium assembled in 1931 to make a bid on the dam project.

LINC "was the first machine that you could take apart and put in the back of your car, carry somewhere else, put back together again, and it would run," Ornstein recalled. "That idea had never previously seemed conceivable.

The Computer Science Lab was a collection of engineers who weighed everything pitilessly against the question: How will this get us closer to our goal? They had committed themselves to developing Xerox's office of the future, and anything that diverted their attention or served an alternative goal had to be discarded or obliterated.

The governing principle of PARC was that the place existed to give their employer that ten-year head start on the future. They even contrived a shorthand phrase to explain the concept. The Alto, they said, was a time machine. Thacker

In 1973 the companies and individuals later to be identified with the advent of the personal computer were otherwise engaged. IBM was still turning out electric typewriters; Microsoft's Bill Gates was a freshman entering Harvard; and Steve Jobs, the future co-founder of Apple Computer, was a college dropout wandering around India in search of his Zen master. But

the most effective problem-finders become adept at searching for and identifying patterns.

Far too much research conducted at business schools today has little or no value to business leaders.

If you buy a 486 with a SuperVGA, you'll get performance that knocks your socks off, especially if you run Windows.

It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

The best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.

Boon and Watt had the bad—or perhaps good—fortune to come of age during one of rock's most abject periods. "That Seventies stuff, the Journey, Boston, Foreigner stuff, it was lame," Watt says. "If it weren't for those type of bands we never would have had the nerve to be a band. But I guess you need bad things to make good things. It's like with farming—if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure.

With their less-than-rudimentary musicianship, Beat Happening might have been making a conceptual point, but it was also the best they could manage.

George Bernard Shaw made the point best: 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him … The unreasonable man adapts the surrounding conditions to himself … All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

He stood at the gateway between two worlds, at the place where imagination passed into creation.

The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues.

designers actually can change the world for the better by making the complicated simple and finding beauty in truth.

use design as a secret disguise to infiltrate whatever world you want to go into. If you do that over and over again, and then translate that interest and curiosity into the work that you're doing, you'll do great.