Quotes About Innovation

Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation. —Mason Cooley

I always suspected that programmers became programmers because they got to play God with the little universe boxes on their desks.

Build what you need as you need it, aggressively refactoring as you go along; don't spend a lot of time planning for grandiose, unknown future scenarios. Good software can evolve into what it will ultimately become.

If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they'll fix it. Or they'll throw it away and come up with something else.

we programmers spend our lives writing code so that our fellow human beings no longer need to write code

Success is rarely determined by the quality of your ideas. But it is frequently determined by the quality of your execution.

But everyone should try writing a little code, because it somehow sharpens the mind, right?

Oftentimes, the whole reason we became programmers in the first place is because we wanted to move beyond being a mere player and change the game, control it, modify its parameters, maybe even create our own games.

Writing code? That's the easy part. Getting your application in the hands of users, and creating applications that people actually want to use—now that's the hard stuff.

Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying no to all but the most crucial features.

If it ain't broken then lets damn well try and break it.

Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight quickly recognized that Riswold

We humans co-evolve with our tools. We change the tools, and the tools change us.

We start with the customer and we work backward. We learn whatever skills we need to service the customer. We build whatever technology we need to service the customer.

The physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

Strip malls are a symbol for marginal, low-experience stores that nobody really wants to go to. Over time, say within 10 years, maybe 15 percent of commerce will move online. Will that have a big impact on the physical world? Absolutely. What will that effect be? It will force stores to get better. The ones that don't get better will go by the wayside.

We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.

I think the great thing about humans in general is we're always improving things.

There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting--stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.

Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.

Strip malls are history.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.