Quotes About Innovation

Researchers have e-mailed text files across the Internet, uploaded them to DNA replicators, and then dropped the DNA copy into "blank" cells, which have then started up and become identical versions of the original organism. It still blows my mind that you can e-mail life like you can cat pictures. Any day now we'll read about some researchers actually e-mailing the cat across the Internet.

A creative mind is always on (unless it's not).

We live in an incredible age. People like Laney get it, so do some of the general public. But I think they're still in that early phase like the internet in the 1990s. Yes, they know space is an industry now. Sure, they may know of someone who is peripherally involved. But they don't realize how big things are going to get.

Fun fact: the first manmade object in space was a Nazi V2 rocket in 1942. Space historians and people who like to remind you how there would be no private space industry without NASA tend to gloss over how much those goose-stepping assholes contributed to rocket technology.

if there were no stupidity in the world, we'd all be riding around in flying cars and colonizing Proxima Centauri

My solution was to make that a feature, not a bug.

Almost five hundred years ago, John Wilkins, a philosopher and bishop, pushed heavily for the written language to adopt an upside-down exclamation point at the end of a sentence to indicate irony. Think of how many online feuds that could have prevented.

the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. arthur c. clark

What I mean is that if I'm making up something in my head using places and situations I already know, then it goes smoothly.

Good science requires having your ideas challenged, and that's often difficult for the people whose paychecks you sign.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.

The most successful ran a shop full of scribes turning out several dozen copies a week. These avvisi were succinct, wide ranging and remarkably well informed.

This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged safe by conventional standards.

Alan Turing installed something known as a bombe machine, an electro-mechanical device which made hundreds

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,' George Bernard Shaw wrote in 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'; 'the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Sometimes the world's most brilliant ideas don't work. Doesn't make them any less insightful.

Mages, unsurprisingly, loved researching new and exciting ways to explode things just as much as anyone else. I

It's not cheating; it's expedited nonlinear puzzle completion.

I don't know why I have a pattern of running into hand-destroying situations, but that seems to be my lot in life. Maybe I need to figure out how to make magical prosthetics. I should research that later.

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job.

Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?

Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and