Quotes About Innovation

Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T's into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America.

What distinguishes people who are ten times more effective than the norm is not that they work ten times as hard; it's that they use their creativity to come up with solutions that require one-tenth of the effort.

Make you part of your product or service. Inject what's unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.

But maybe the only way to achieve the impossible was to be unaware that was what you were trying to do.

Conventional wisdom won't provide continual growth.

Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.

we're not going to spend any money making the changes. If something doesn't work we'll fix it. We want creativity before capital and quick and crude rather than slow and elegant.

Lantech's reinvention intervention answers one of the most fundamental questions about embracing change: Whose idea wins? The answer, of course, is that the best idea should win—not the boss's idea, not the boss's kid's idea, not the strategy department's idea, not the old idea, not the competition's idea; only the best idea should win.

Lancaster takes us back to where we started, but with a brilliant twist. The test of intelligence is indeed the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in one's mind, appreciate both, and still function. But you don't have to be the be-all and end-all expert in your business at one side or the other. In fact, you can be the one who doesn't excel at either. You can be the one who appreciates both and creates the conditions for both sides to flourish.

in an effort to stop the bleeding, in one fell swoop Schultz closed one thousand underperforming stores, eliminated seven thousand positions, revised the business plan downward to numbers they could hit, and embraced radical change and began making a dizzying series of small bets.

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

Have some general backup ideas in mind, but don't let the backup plan be carved in stone. That will prevent you from learning. The time to begin building formalized backup plans is during the tweaking, changing, and maneuvering that occurs while studying the results of the small bet. Backup plans become vital when a small bet that's turned out to be successful is about to be scaled in size.

Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we'd better do it quickly.

Innovator Charles Kettering, the longtime head of research at General Motors and a prolific inventor, had warned his industry colleagues about getting caught in this trap. "An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously," he said. In other words, inventors are engineers who can let go of their expertness and achieve what Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs, called the "lightness of being a beginner again.

THE REINVENTION KILLERS Yesterday's Breadwinners Every product or service has a natural life cycle that begins with an introduction, followed by growth, maturity, and inevitably a decline as it becomes yesterday's breadwinner. There are no exceptions

I undertook this project with the vague notion that reinvention was about moving a business from point A to point B. But that's not what I found. We discovered that in the process of moving from A to B these businesses developed new skill sets and values that allowed them to quickly progress to C, D, E, and beyond. They all became serial reinventors and embraced constant radical change.

Companies committed to growth make staying ahead of their customers' wants and needs a hallmark of their culture and accomplish that goal through constant radical change and reinvention.

Great companies [inevitably] develop a rowboat mentality," says Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony. They are "always looking behind to past successes" with awe and admiration as they row into the future.

As testament to the passion for change and reinvention that Apple embraces, more than half of the company's revenue comes from products that didn't exist four years ago.

We are working hard to avoid living in our past," he says. Stringer recognized that the real culprit standing in the way of progress at Sony was a tradition-bound mentality and began systematically letting go of the traditions and people that had hamstrung the company.

Here's the list of opposing ideas that successful reinventors say you need in your head: Hold on tight and freely let go. Be hard-nosed and soft hearted. Focus on a clear destination and search for new horizons. Take big risks and make small bets. Be frugal and still splurge. Think big and act small. Be highly creative and obsessively down-to-earth. Thoughtfully work your plan and improvise without thinking too much.

But the billion-dollar cut was anything but self-defeating tinkering. Many of the research scientists were energized. They cleaned out the cobwebs and refocused their thinking, many spending quality time with customers. The result was scores of innovations that matter. Frugal was a catalyst, not a catastrophe.

Millner is just as excited about the culture of continuous improvement that is at the core of Cabela's. "Adaptation is critical. You've got to adapt. No matter how successful you are, the minute you can't do what you've done, you've got to let it go. If you don't continuously improve, you die.