Quotes About Innovation

When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it! Safety first!

Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.

When our small research group moved from MIT to Dartmouth College years ago, one of the Dartmouth engineering professors watched us in seminars for a while, and then dropped by our offices. "You people are different," he said. "You ask different kinds of questions. You see things I don't see. Somehow you come at the world in a different way. How? Why?

Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

All you need is stones... If you have enough stones and the water is shallow enough, you can build a city up through the waves.

Higher education is one of few areas where this country competes with the rest of the world and wins. The best of American higher education outstrips any in the world. Look where the rest of the world goes for higher education, for graduate degrees. They come here.

DONNA: Why do traditional organizing solutions and tools not work for them?

Some ideas are dangerous.

It's a lot of work to keep reinventing yourself and coming up with new stuff, but that's what it takes to be in show business.

Our students sometimes use their creativity to do wrong things, and we therefore conclude that we must keep them from being creative. But evil cannot be blamed on creativity. (p31)

Nonsense. Fools refuse to try something new.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Leadership, Boal concluded, is the art of facilitating imaginative interventions by the greatest possible number...

So long as new ideas are created, sales will continue to reach new highs.

The Wright brothers flew through the smoke screen of impossibility.

Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier.

Every book, every editor, every teacher will tell you that the great key to success in authorship is originality

I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'

I'm forever learning and that's why I'm always able to create new styles and new dimensions of hip-hop.

MTV is the lava lamp of the 1980's.

Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.