Quotes About Innovation

If rivals all pursue the "one best way" to compete, they will find themselves on a collision course.

For Porter, strategic competition means choosing a path different from that of others. Instead of competing to be the best, companies can—and should—compete to be unique.

Strategic competition means choosing a path different from that of others.

Competing to be unique is unlike warfare in that one company's success does not require its rivals to fail. It is unlike competition in sports because every company can chose to invent its own game. A better analogy than war or sports might be the performing arts.

Seeing that gate turnarounds are a significant cost driver, you would then dive a level deeper, to the many specific subactivities involved in gate turnarounds. Here you'd be looking for ways to lower your costs without sacrificing customer value. This is how you drive an even greater wedge between your performance and that of your rivals.

than from the product itself.

Charles Schwab created the company that bears his name—and a new category known as discount brokerage—around a different value chain. Not all customers want advice, so why should they have to pay for it? Take away all the activities needed to give advice, focus instead on executing trades, and you can create a different kind of value: low-cost trades that make stock ownership accessible to a wider customer base.

Precisely because substitutes are not direct rivals, they often come from unexpected places. This makes substitutes difficult to anticipate or even to see once they appear. The threat of substitution is especially tricky when it comes at one remove.

disruptive technology will invalidate the assets of the current generation of industry leaders. Digital

According to company legend, here's how Southwest Airlines was born. Back in the late 1960s, "a couple of guys said, 'Here's an idea. Why don't we start an airline that charges just a few bucks and has lots of flights every day instead of what the other guys are doing—charging a lot of bucks and having just a few flights each day?

Blue Ocean Strategy

If rivalry is intense, companies compete away the value they create, passing it on

I want to assassinate painting.

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a button, cannot program it.

Chances are everything's already been said, but since no one is paying attention you have to start all over again.

If you are a woman and wish to become pre-eminent in a field, it's a good idea to (a) invent it and (b) locate it in an area either so badly paid or of such low status that men don't want it

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the as­sumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time.

I'd rather be a freak than a clone.

Why not"! That is SO wise. So many things would be possible in this world if you thought "Why not?" all day long.

But I should not have to explain to you how important it is for science and simplicity to coexist. One must not fear to be a little child again, when times of wonder are at hand.

But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.

Heresy and progress often look much alike.

A whole new thing. A forging of the humble parts of bread and cheese into a greater whole. I call it...a cheese-trap.

At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.)