Quotes About Innovation

would like to see a fund set up that does nothing but pay for great public buildings, follies, laser shows, towers, fountains, airships, aqueducts. Big, expensive stuff designed solely to make us go 'wow'. I even have a name for this fund. We could call it the lottery.

Make no mistake, Concorde was an extraordinary technological achievement. Almost certainly, one of the greatest.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you're always asked to do what you've already done.

In 1957, IBM's weight was two-thirds of the technology sector; in 2013, IBM was only the third largest in a sector that contains 70 firms.

Architecture and building is about how you get around the obstacles that are presented to you. That sometimes determines how successful you'll be: How good are you at going around obstacles?

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

But what if I were to say to you that 25 years from now, the bulk of the energy you use to heat your home and run your appliances, power your business, drive your vehicle, and operate every part of the global economy will likewise be nearly free? That's already the case for several million early adopters

consider the fact that a journey from New York to Chicago by stagecoach would have taken three weeks or more in 1847. By 1857, that same trip by rail would have taken 72 hours.12

Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.

A book is an experiment, and as with all experiments, there is a sense of uncertainty about how it will turn out.

Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there's a man who sits behind a counter and says, "All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline. Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit the Wind

Physicists had only recently discovered radioactivity,

In this game, mistakes and errors are good. They help us uncover new relationships.

Look, suppose you're an official in the National Science Foundation, and a guy comes to you and says: Listen I have this interesting idea, give me $100,000 and I'll work on it. And then 50 of the most respected people in the field come up to you and say: Look, the guy's crazy, that can't be true. Who are you going to believe? You're going to end up supporting a very conservative, middle brow scientific institution. It's hopeless.

Light bulbs are very, VERY complicated.

I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come.

Business can be a source of progressive change.

Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can't tell me that we are done making the world.

Playing video games and making comics didn't look like raw materials for success. In fact, what we were doing looked very similar to fucking around.

The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.

Which is the point: the future looks a lot more like the past than you might expect.