Quotes About Innovation

Most public companies spend less than 2 percent of their annual budgets on R&D.

The lesson from the Big Mac story is that innovations that ought to be scaled won't happen everywhere but can happen anywhere.

variation leads to excellence in social systems

there is little reason to believe that managers or other authorities will make more accurate predictions than anyone else about which new ideas will succeed and fail.

During the early stages of a project, don't study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.

variance in people, knowledge, activities, and organizational structures is crucial to creativity and innovation.

to find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don't.

Safe is a word that goes much better with sex than science."14

William Coyne, former head of research and development at 3M, tells how a human resource manager once threatened to fire a scientist who was asleep under his bench. Coyne took the HR manager to 3M's "Wall of Patents" to show him that the sleeping scientist had developed some of 3M's most profitable products. Coyne advised, "Next time you see him asleep, get him a pillow."3 Unfortunately, not all executives are so wise.

innovative companies need a wide range of ideas and that success requires a high failure rate.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination...they think ahead and create their mental picture in all it details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building--steadily building.

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine

advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970,

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.

Throughout American economic life, regulatory barriers to entry and competition limit innovation by providing excessive monopoly privileges through copyright and patent laws, restrict occupational choice by protecting incumbent service providers through occupational licensing restrictions, and create artificial scarcity through land-use regulation. They contribute to increased inequality while reducing productivity growth.

Pioneers in the development of particular products and industries have been described by Schumpeter as "innovators," those "individuals who are daring, speculative, restless, imaginative and, more pertinently, eager to exploit new inventions.

Electric light, the first reliable internal combustion engine, and wireless transmission were all invented within the same three-month period at the end of 1879. Within

Between 1940 and 1970, output per person and output per hour continued to increase rapidly, in part as a result of three of the most important subsidiary spinoffs of IR #2—air conditioning, the interstate highway system, and commercial air transport—while the world of personal entertainment was forever altered by television.

they were expected to, well, to be sciencing by oh eight hundred.

I don't want to stand on the shoulders of giants." He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought rarely spoken aloud. "I want to be a giant.