Quotes About Innovation

In the eighties and nineties, the innovation agenda was exclusively focused on enterprises. There was a time in which economic and social issues were seen as separate. Economy was producing wealth, society was spending. In the 21st century economy, this is not true anymore. Sectors like health, social services and education have a tendency to grow, in GDP percentage as well as in creating employment, whereas other industries are decreasing. In the long term, an innovation in social services or education will be as important as an innovation in the pharmaceutical or aerospatial industry.

Leapfrog innovation - consistent, constant, ridiculous leapfrog innovation - only happens within a dictatorship. Any time you try to do something really innovative, most people aren't going to understand it until after they experience it. So when you're developing in innovation, you have to be a dictator.

In general, the questions that are on our mind are the same questions that have been driving our work over the past decade. How do we bring order to this messy, unpredictable world of innovation? How can we dramatically improve the chances of creating a successful new-growth business? How can we do this again and again? More specifically, it has become very clear that the fundamental paradigms of market segmentation and branding are badly broken - and we're working on developing more useful theories for these dimensions of innovation.

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.” TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO

Innovation doesn't come from the big company. It never has and never will. Innovation is something new that looks crazy at first glance. It comes from the 19-year-olds and the start-ups that no one's heard of.

Even an organization that doesn't do much work internationally will benefit from a culturally intelligent strategy to innovation. Working across different generations, business units, regions, and functions are all factors that can also influence the innovation process.

There's a huge misconception that innovation is mostly about inventing or coming up with cool new things. More often than not, innovation is about figuring out what people really need or want but can't have or afford.

If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation; this is the end of innovation.

Kaizen and innovation are the two major strategies people use to create change. Where innovation demands shocking and radical reform, all kaizen asks is that you take small, comfortable steps toward improvement.

What keeps me up late at night, in the sense of worry, I guess it's innovation. It's funny to be worried about it, because it's a fair point that wow, look at the innovation we've seen over the past, not just 30 years, but over the past two years.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation.

For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There's many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.

Even though effective competition is the best tool to strengthen innovation and competitiveness in Europe, state aid can also play a very useful supporting role.

Innovation doesn't come from one big thing, it comes from a piece at a time, from combining existing technology. We have in a sense a stagnation, in all those areas where we have cronyism and political correctness and the precautionary principle. Get all of those together, then yeah, you have stagnation, and that's what we're seeing.

I took a long view in order to not destroy the core Galvin-defined principles imbued in Motorola, such as constant respect for people, its instincts for breakthrough innovation, and continuous renewal in thinking and process rigor.

Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.

[F]or all its reputation for conservatism, cricket in its history has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for innovation. What game has survived subjection to such extraordinary manipulations, having been prolonged to 10 days (in Durban 70 years ago), truncated to as few as 60 balls (in Hong Kong every year), and remained recognisable in each instance?

Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology.

Part of the challenge of innovation is coming up with the problem to solve, not just its solution.

Without impact, innovation is just an idea with promise.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Executive Severance, a laugh out loud comic mystery novel, epitomizes our current cultural moment in that it is born from the juxtaposition of authorial invention and technological communication innovation. Merging creative text with new electronic context, Robert K. Blechman's novel, which originally appeared as Twitter entries, can be read on a cell phone. His tweets which merge to form an entertaining novel can't be beat. Hold the phone; exalt in the mystery-engage with Blechman's story which signals the inception of a new literary art form.

Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy.

The road to recovery is to stimulate small business and innovation by reducing taxation, regulation, and litigation.

Innovation is doubly hard inside big companies.

Pure pragmatism can't imagine a bold future. Pure idealism can't get anything done. It is the delicate blend of both that drives innovation.

Kaizen is like a hotbed that nurtures small and ongoing changes, while innovation is like magma that appears in abrupt eruptions from time to time

People who should be the first to recognize the value of an innovation are often the last.

In the history of enterprise, most of the protagonists of major new products and companies began their education - not in the classroom, where the old ways are taught, but in the factories and labs where new ways are wrought ... nothing has been so rare in recent years as an Ivy League graduate who has made a significant innovation in American enterprise.

On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better.

Economy is so riddled with corporate welfare and anti-competitive regulations, anti-innovation regulations. Regulations that are destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged, which is creating this two-tiered system we're headed for which has which is destroying opportunities for the disadvantaged and creating welfare for the wealthy.

We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.

Basically, to lead without a title is to derive your power within the organisation not from your position but from your competence, effectiveness, relationships, excellence, innovation and ethics.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different.

If you've got a company that has a mentality inside that is filled with searching for a better idea every day, not just as a slogan but as a real concept, you will have innovation around you all the time.

Success doesn’t necessarily come from breakthrough innovation but from flawless execution. A great strategy alone won’t win a game or a battle; the win comes from basic blocking and tackling.

A company's culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneurs job is to build the foundation

On an iPhone, you touch on the digital keyboard and you know how the letter pops up and shows up bigger so you're making sure you're touching the correct letter? That's Nokia innovation.

Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.

I think markets are mechanisms that determine prices that are necessary for mass heterogenous populations, and markets do generate levels of technological innovation and productivity that is crucial. But when unregulated, they often generate levels of vast inequality and ugly isolation that makes it difficult for people to relate and connect with one another.

We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

Our future growth relies on competitiveness and innovation, skills and productivity... and these in turn rely on the education of our people.

The best leaders are apt to be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their character. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it.

Basic philosophy, spirit and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.

In the business world, there are systems and processes for just about everything else. Yet creativity and innovation, arguably THE most important aspects of progress, are often left to happen by chance. The system provides a scaffolding for creative support and exploration, yet is open enough to avoid curbing creativity or outputting cookie-cutter solutions.