Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

The trouble with much of the advice business is getting today about the need to be more vigorously creative is, essentially, that its advocates have generally failed to distinguish between the relatively easy process of being creative in the abstract and the infinitely more difficult process of being innovationist in the concrete.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!

Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection.