Quotes About Innovation

There's a spirit to the western people, that is unique in the world.

Leaders do not simply invent a Purpose; they discover it, while at the same time developing a strategy and ensuring that Purpose and strategy support each other.

Purpose stimulates the two key forms of action that contribute to the strengths of the firm and thus competitive advantage—innovation and the formation of relationships.

competition between companies is at least in part a competition between different moral ideas.

Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

People always ask me if I could live in any other era what would it be, and I tell them none! I feel so lucky to live in an age where technology has changed and continues to change and make life so much more exciting. It keeps everyone young and constantly learning new things.

It's never enough," he repeated, "but it is so much more than we had before. Without the Millennium project there would be no drugs, there would be no surgical equipment, there would be no way to operate the generator—I would be redundant most of the time. They say funding will continue, but someday it will stop, and when the funding stops, most likely everything we have done will be put to waste. I do not see how we are going to continue after they have left.

Medicine is like the slow raising of masonry," Rob said. "We are fortunate, in a lifetime, to be able to lay a single brick. If we can explain the disease, someone yet unborn may devise a cure.

To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function

Dreamers will always dream.

Layla draws on her electronic cigarette. This is what the future looks like, Scott thinks. We smoke technology now.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.

Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.

Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.

I just want to keep making music, recording and trying different things. I don't want to do the same thing all the time.

At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people.

Most of us are too close to the idea of progress to take cognizance either of the fact that this belief belongs only to a small part of recorded history, or of the other fact, that it represents a sharp break with our own religious professions and traditions.

The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.

Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community. If the reader wishes to conceive this as a metaphoric extension of our human personalities, he is welcome to do so; but he should be cautioned that the new machines will not stop working as soon as we have stopped giving them human support.

Don't tell them how to do it!  Just teach them the principles of Lean, challenge them, and let them do it."   John Miller – Gemba Research

Kohei Goshi, the 81 year old founder of the Japan Productivity Center, our host in Japan, said, "Americans are very good at inventing, but we may be better at raising a baby.