Quotes About Innovation

curiosity is the key to creativity

Mitch McConnell's innovation was in using it constantly to slow down things that did have bipartisan support, just to make sure as little as possible happened that Obama could get credit for. You

I took the initiative in creating the Internet

The good news is we know what to do. The good news is we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need, though more and better ones are being developed, and as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale, they will make it easier to respond. We have everything we need—save perhaps political will. And in our democracy, political will is a renewable resource.

Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won't have a chance in the marketplace. And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category.

Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.

If you want to build a successful brand, you have to understand divergence. You have to look for opportunities to create new categories by divergence of existing categories. And then you have to become the first brand in this emerging new category.

When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not 'How is this new product better than the competition?' but 'First what?' In other words, what category is this new product first in?

Everyone is interested in what's new. Few people are interested in what's better.

The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.

Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it.

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

imaginative possession

An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor.

More data flows into the building in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone.

having acquired a skill at turning grief into ideas

The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.

That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.

Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd.

one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.

it is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.