Quotes About Innovation

Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art.

People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

In recognition that any good idea is a fragile thing, you have to give it a few minutes to breath—like a good red wine.

When you have nothing to say, set something on fire. A blurry landscape is useless.

The most beautiful things in the world," Ford said a quarter century later, "are those from which all excess weight has been eliminated." The car he was working on would weigh five hundred pounds.

Your invention must be new. The USPTO grants patents for new (or "novel") inventions only. Your invention isn't new if someone previously invented it, patented it, or wrote about it before your filing date. However, there would be an exception if you (the inventor) or anyone who obtained the subject matter from you made certain disclosures of the claimed invention within a limited one-year grace period before filing.

If we leave it to professionals themselves to reinvent their workplace, are we asking the rabbits to guard the lettuce?

We are advancing into a post-professional society.

The deeper issue here is that any changes in the work that people do tend to originate at the level of particular tasks involved, and not with the job in general terms.

It is interesting to note, harking back again to the exponential growth of information technology, that the hardware on which Watson ran in 2011 was said to be about the size of the average bedroom. Today, we are told, it runs on a machine that is the size of three pizza boxes, and by the early 2020s Watson will sit comfortably in a smartphone.

Half of US doctors use the app known as Epocrates, a digital drug-reference resource that computerizes the task of finding out how different drugs interact. This task was once a time-consuming, often inconclusive piece of excavation from a 2,500-page drug-reference manual, known as the Physicians Desk Reference.

The Canadian science-fiction writer William Gibson could well have been speaking of technology in the professions when he said: '[t]he future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Technology will be the main driver of this change. And, in the long run, we will neither need nor want professionals to work in the way that they did in the twentieth century and before.

The end of the professional era is characterized by four trends: the move from bespoke service; the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers; a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to professional work; and the more-for-less challenge.

We also see intra-professional friction, when, for example, nurses take on work that used to be exclusive to doctors, or paralegals are engaged to perform tasks that formerly were the province of lawyers.

This is a new division of labour, and traditional professionals sometimes struggle here because they are no longer in the driving-seat.

Automation is what most professionals have in mind when they think of the relevance of technology for their disciplines.

This automation therefore complements but does not fundamentally change the central way in which services are delivered.

However, as Chapter 2 shows, there is a new generation of machine in action now, and these are systems (much more of which in Chapter 4) that can replace parts of, and sometimes all of, certain kinds of professional work.

Whereas automation is the use of technology to support this traditional model, innovation enables ways of making practical expertise available that simply were not possible (or even imaginable) without the systems in question.

Sending e-mails and texts is an automated version of writing letters, whereas social networking is an innovative technology, by which we mean, in this context, that it gives rise to ways of communicating that were not possible in the past.