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Innovation Quotes


"We had grain but no mills, so I designed a special mill of wood so we could make flour."



"We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac."


"You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental."


"People who can solve problems in a new way are the innovators."


"New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?"


"We, we - as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market."



"You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition."


"Innovators are pioneers, great problem-solvers; and creators of a better context."


"Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory."



"We have three cats. It's like having children, but there is no tuition involved."


"To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard."


"Throw an idea into the world and its impact will ripple and reverberate beyond your side of the shore."



"And then you take a look at Spaces, there is this great innovation that came out of nowhere. We have the number one blogging site in the world because of the innovation that's there."


"Great things often come from actions and decisions taken by others, that are deemed wild, stupid or unreasonable at the time, but later prove to be very useful."


"I shot with it a lot. I still do now. That is why I am hard of hearing."


"I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there."



"The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all."



"I liken myself to Henry Ford and the auto industry, I give you 90 percent of what most people need."


"An idea is like a spark in the dark " it makes everything brighter."


"She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it."



"To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."


"Too many would-be executives are slaves of routine."


"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."


"David Wallerstein discovered that people would spring for more popcorn and soda- a lot more- as long as it came in a single gigantic serving. Thus was born the two-quart bucket of popcorn, the sixty-four-ounce Big Gulp, and, in time, the Big Mac and the jumbo fries."



"Money coming in says I've made the right marketing decisions."



"America is the most inventive country in the world because everybody has access to information."



"The future lies in designing and selling computers that people don't realize are computers at all."



"The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."



"The scientists often have more unfettered imaginations than current philosophers do. Relativity theory came as a complete surprise to philosophers, and so did quantum mechanics, and so did other things."


"There is no more precious currency than the unfettered liberty to explore while engaged in an "Idea Economy". You cannot centrally plan the "Idea Economy" any more than you can plan fun or spontaneity. Regulations are restraints in an "Idea Economy". The entrepreneur is either free to experiment or not."


"I have seen the Raiders develop into what they are today."


"Man's capacity to innovate should not exceed his ability to live in peace."


"America demands invention and innovation to succeed."


"Our inventions mirror our secret wishes."


"When the PC was launched, people knew it was important."



"As a result, we will continue to see more innovation on the Internet and on mobile phones than on consoles."


"When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway."


"The future is trapped in a cage opened only by the key of genius."


"I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate."



"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."


"Everyone is trying to do something that hasn't been done and that's a really good thing. You can only do so much with a story and some scripts don't give you the opportunities and other scripts do give you the opportunities to do things that haven't been done before."



"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."


"People are usually more interested in what is new, rather than what is better."



"Innovators are the ones whose dreams are clearer than the reality that tells them they're crazy."


"So many cartoonists draw the same year after year. When they find a style, they stick with it. They don't mess with innovation, and they become boring."


"1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."


"The one that will put the first human colony on another planet is certainly the most important human on Earth. And you can judge the rest of mankind of his time by how they judge him along the way."
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