Quotes & Sayings About Ideas And Innovation

I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way ... why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do - and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view. — Nathaniel J. Wyeth

If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the 'slow hunch.' We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them." Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time - available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation. — Douglas Rushkoff

If managed well, urbanization can create enormous opportunities: allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge, saving energy, land and natural resources, managing climate and the risk of disasters. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Not every innovation in transportation is going to come from government or even a large enterprise. There are smart people out there with tools and skills to come up with great ideas. — Anthony Foxx

It's not that I don't believe in creativity and innovation and new ideas, and the creativity that comes with fashion, which I really respect. But one of my biggest concerns is just how cheap we expect everything to be. — Lily Cole

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 — Daniel H. Pink

Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy. — Matt Ridley

Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility - a small beginning that must be nurtured, developed, engineer, tinkered with, championed, tested, implemented and checked ideas have no value until they are implemented. — Alan Robinson

When does your next idea come? You don't really know yet, and therefore there's a lot of uncertainty associated with innovation companies. Most often, the true innovators have to stand all by themselves at the beginning and predict that the world will be different. — Christopher Galvin

Capitalism historically has been a very dynamic force, and behind that force is technical progress, innovation, new ideas, new products, new technologies, and new methods of managing teams. — Manmohan Singh

Entrepreneurship is when an individual retrieves a red hot idea from the creativity furnace without the constraint of the heat of lean resources, and with each persistent blow of the innovation hammer shapes the still malleable idea against the anvil of passion, vision, insight, strategy, and principles to forge a fitting vessel of a creative concern. — Amah Lambert

The diverse threats we face are increasingly cyber-based. Much of America's most sensitive data is stored on computers. We are losing data, money, and ideas through cyber intrusions. This threatens innovation and, as citizens, we are also increasingly vulnerable to losing our personal information. — James Comey

As an innovator, you need to be aware of how traditions, habits and bias can act as barriers to accepting new ideas. — Max McKeown

Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience. — Warren G. Bennis

Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development. — David J. Greer

If there are no new ideas, there is no innovation. And if there is no creativity, there are no new ideas. — Max McKeown

Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form. — Watts Humphrey

Without death there is little innovation. Extinction - death of a species - is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper. In our own history, periods when ideas have been perpetuated by dogma, preventing the replacement of old by new ideas, have also been times of stultifying stagnation. The Dark Ages in western society were the most static, least innovative of times. So the fact that trilobites were replaced by batches of successive species through their long history was a testimony to their evolutionary vigour. — Richard Fortey

For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong. — Scott Berkun

We need innovation. We need great ideas that can be simply and effectively produced all over the place. — Helen Clark

Nowadays, ideas can meet and mate very much faster than before, and the Internet is only accelerating this process. So innovation is bound to accelerate. — Matt Ridley

Creation is not a moment of inspiration but a lifetime of endurance. The drawers of the world are full of things begun. Unfinished sketches, pieces of invention, incomplete product ideas, notebooks with half-formulated hypotheses, abandoned patents, partial manuscripts. Creating is more monotony than adventure. It is early mornings and late nights: long hours doing work that will likely fail or be deleted or erased - a process without progress that must be repeated daily for years. Beginning is hard, but continuing is harder. Those who seek a glamorous life should not pursue art, science, innovation, invention, or anything else that needs new. Creation is a long journey where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don't do is quit. The — Kevin Ashton

Keep a note pad and pencil on your bedside table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3 A.M. — H. Jackson Brown Jr.

It's the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic which causes the wooliness and confusion around the term 'innovation'. Everybody wants to be innovative; many companies and ideas are proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that innovation is a money spinner. And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation. — James Dyson

Innovation has beauty in it. The speed of innovations is getting faster and faster. Remember that ideas are the seeds of innovation. — Debasish Mridha

Jeffrey Pfeffer and I found that many ineffective companies suffer from this disease, which we call the "smart talk trap."17 This a syndrome where companies hire, reward, and promote people for sounding smart rather than making sure that smart things are done. In such organizations, talking somehow becomes an acceptable - even a preferred - substitute for actually doing anything. Inaction is bad for any company. But it is especially devastating when innovation is the goal, because so many ideas need to be tried to find a few that might work. — Robert I. Sutton

Build a heterogeneous team to close three gaps in innovation management - idea gaps, collaboration gaps, and implementation gaps — Pearl Zhu

You have to free your brain to roam to places that are a little impractical, and innovation consultants have come up with some great ways to encourage that. One of my favorites comes from Legrand, who tells people in group brainstorming sessions to try to come up with the WORST possible ideas that they can think of ... Once you have a list of really, really bad suggestions - and coming up with them does force your brain to work in a different way - you try to flip them over into the positive. — Amanda Lang

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 — Henry Chesbrough

Innovation, sales and marketing are less about ideas and persuasion and more about understanding. We forget that. People don't want one more nudge in the direction we have decided they need to go. They need us to build our businesses around what we notice will make their lives better. WHERE — Bernadette Jiwa

Innovation is the opposite of average. It is refusing to coast, rejecting the status quo, and having the courage to shake up the meaningless routines that lead to laziness. Innovation is the act of exploring new ideas, and every leader must develop this habit in his own life if he wants to become a change maker. Innovators are authentic voices, not just echo chambers. — Brad Lomenick

Creativity is the ability to create novel value, and innovation is how to transform ideas and achieve their business value. — Pearl Zhu

Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys. — Sam Walton

T-shaped people " those with a depth of knowledge in at least one discipline and a breadth of knowledge about innovation and entrepreneurship that allows them to work effectively with professionals on other disciplines to bring their ideas to life. — Tina Seelig

Where was innovation to come from? We have argued that innovation comes from new people with new ideas, developing new solutions to old problems. In Rome the people doing the producing were slaves and, later, semi-servile coloni with few incentives to innovate, since it was their masters, not they, who stood to benefit from any innovation. As we will see many times in this book, economies based on the repression of labor and systems such as slavery and serfdom are notoriously noninnovative. This is true from the ancient world to the modern era. In the United States, for example, the northern states took part in the Industrial Revolution, not the South. Of course slavery and serfdom created huge wealth for those who owned the slaves and controlled the serfs, but it did not create technological innovation or prosperity for society. N — Daron Acemoglu

When one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments. — Steven Johnson

Creativity is the generation and initial development of new, useful ideas. Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas in an organization. Thus, no innovation is possible without the creative processes that mark the front end of the process: identifying important problems and opportunities, gathering relevant information, generating new ideas, and exploring the validity of those ideas. — Teresa Amabile

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products. — Thomas L. Friedman

Our government's investments in science, technology and innovation are ensuring that ideas move from the lab to the marketplace faster, creating jobs and opportunities for Canadians. Through our investment in Mitacs Elevate, we are providing training and new career opportunities for talented researchers while ensuring that local businesses such as Vision Extrusions stay competitive and continue to create jobs here in Woodbridge. — Julian Fantino

There are three related ideas, which I will elaborate as we go on. They are imagination, which is the process of bringing to mind things that are not present to our senses; creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice. — Ken Robinson

Look at the product pipeline, look at the fantastic financial results we've had for the last five years. You only get that kind of performance on the innovation side, on the financial side, if you're really listening and reacting to the best ideas of the people we have. — Steve Ballmer

The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It's gone up as people have concentrated in cities. — Peter Diamandis

The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams. — W. Arthur Porter

Share your success stories with others. Don't brag, but don't hide your light. People want (and need) to be inspired and instructed. I know I want to follow and learn from successful people. Isn't that the basis for every business and self-help book? People will also give you good ideas to build on your own wins when you share openly. And when you write out your wins to an audience, your own ideas start to grow within you. Will you try? What's a win you've had lately? Don't be shy about it. — Richie Norton

Innovative ideas aren't generated in structured, authoritarian environments but in an adaptive culture based on the principles of self-organization and self-discipline. — Jim Highsmith

If you want to express your creativity, then don't choose a path where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished. — Steve Pavlina

A leader is someone who creates better ways of doing things and better ways are new and comfortable ways. — Israelmore Ayivor

There can be no solution to the challenge of climate change that is not global. But if we can come together in partnership, we can transform today's challenge into tomorrow's opportunity - an opportunity for green growth and sustainable prosperity ... we also need a strong bottom-up push from academics and opinion-shapers such as you. Universities such as yours are founts of ideas and innovation. They are furnaces of innovation and entrepreneurship. So, send forth this word. — Ban Ki-moon

Curiosity is the seedling for innovation, and if you can recognize it and react positively to it among your people, you can multiply innovative ideas — David Goldsmith

Don't disregard your so-called "stupid ideas." They may be inspired thoughts and high-potential opportunities. Whatcha gonna do? — Richie Norton

Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it. — Guy Kawasaki

Ignore the real world
"That would never work in the real world." You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea.
This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It's a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always
lose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed and inefficient.
Scratch the surface and you'll find these "real world" inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail. They
assume society isn't ready for or capable of change.
Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you're hopeful and ambitious, they'll try to convince you your ideas are impossible.
They'll say you're wasting your time. — David Heinemeier Hansson

Being young is an advantage. You've grown up with games as the dominant entertainment. You have a lot of experience of video games. So what do you want to see that's not been done? Innovation is really low cost for you. You can afford to take risks and fail to execute new ideas. — Kim Swift

The source of innovation is freedom. All we have - new knowledge, invention - comes from freedom. Discoveries and new knowledge come from freedom. When somebody is responsible only to himself, [has] only himself to satisfy, then you'll have invention, new thought, now product, new design, new ideas. — W. Edwards Deming

To succeed in driving innovation, it is essential for empowering people to push ideas forward, and the entire company to be pulling in the right direction — Pearl Zhu

It's our job in education to free up time for innovation. It's our job to open their minds to new ideas. It's our job to prepare them for the present and future possibilities. — A.J. Juliani

Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research. — Raymond Queneau

We would solve a lot of huge problems that are causing massive suffering. Poverty, violence, homophobia, heterosexism, racism, the environment - all these things that are crippling us. We need big, bold, dangerous, crazy ideas to solve these problems. When failure is not an option, innovation and creativity are not options. — Brene Brown

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. — Tim O'Reilly

When the government tries to run innovation, sometimes it does it well and sometimes it doesn't. So setting up a situation where the market runs innovation, which is a cap-and-trade idea, may well have more flexibility. — Stewart Brand

Demographics need not be destiny. The waning West became what it is not by out-breeding the undeveloped world. We were once great not because of huge numbers, but due to human capital people of superior ideas and abilities, capable of innovation, exploration, science, philosophy. — Ilana Mercer

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate. — Margaret Heffernan

[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They're one way when they're by themselves, and another when they're surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves and grow more appealing, and funnier. You wouldn't want all of intellectual life to be that social--we couldn't make progress that way. But there's a special atmosphere that develops whenever truly different ideas congregate, and, on the whole, it's too rare. — Joshua Rothman

Entrepreneurship is the engine fuelling innovation, employment generation and economic growth. Only by creating an environment where entrepreneur- ship can prosper and where entrepreneurs can try new ideas and empower others can we ensure that many of the world's issues will not go unaddressed. — Klaus Schwab

America's experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It's about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish. — Joe Biden

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. — Jill Lepore

To us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. — Anonymous

... it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and activists, and entrepreneurs alike. — Steven Johnson

Try this: Identify a bottom-up improvement or innovation in your organization, and interview the person who championed it. Chances are you will find a hero story of some kind. Why do we have to be heroes to implement perfectly good ideas? — Alan G. Robinson

It is my firm belief that the solution to all problems lies in dialogue. Earlier, it was believed that force indicates power. Now, power must come through the strength of ideas and the effective dialogue. — Narendra Modi

People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things. — Mark Zuckerberg

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. — Steven Johnson

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind. — Max McKeown

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress. — Theodore Levitt

Crowdsourcing can greatly increase the number of ideas entering the front-end of the innovation funnel, however, using the wrong source can result in a large number of inappropriate ideas, and the lack of defined process for managing the progress of ideas through the funnel can result in the funnel becoming blocked. — D. James Kennedy

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of peoples walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. — Nicholas Negroponte

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

The best innovation comes from inclusive work environments that foster diverse ideas, nurture people with diverse talent and backgrounds, and create strong relationships with diverse communities. — Mark Parker

I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too. — Jeffrey Tucker

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it
perhaps as much more as the roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole. — Will Durant

If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work. — Joel Spolsky

The willingness to be a champion for stupid ideas is the key to greater creativity, innovation, fulfillment, inspiration, motivation and success. — Richie Norton

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courage and patience. — Hyman Rickover

The church should be the most innovative organization on the planet. We should be the first ones to be experimenting with new technology, ideas, and strategies. Sadly we've given our innovation away to places like Apple and our creativity to places like Disney. — Braden Pedersen

The pace of innovation may slow down or speed up depending on the appetite in the public markets, but the constant progress of technology doesn't really ever stop. There's always opportunities for new ideas and creative people to go build great things. I'm always interested in learning about those kinds of opportunities. — Adam Dell

I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me. — Sunni Brown

Fifty years later, in the 1920s, the American DuPont Company independently set up a similar unit and called it a Developmental Department. This department gathers innovative ideas from all over the company, studies them, thinks them through, analyses them. Then it proposes to top management which ones should be tackled as major innovative projects. From the beginning, it brings to bear on the innovation all the resources needed: research, development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and so on. It is in charge until the new product or service has been on the market for a few years. — Peter F. Drucker

While leaders spend considerable time and effort trying to envision markets and pushing out innovation, empathy can often generate simple, yet breakthrough ideas. — John Gerzema

Throughout history, people with new ideas - who think differently and try to change things - have always been called troublemakers. — Richelle Mead

It's sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it's important to remember they weren't always separate realms of inquiry. — Brad Warner

You're also looking at a global warming solution here in Europe: smaller vehicles, more energy efficient, many which use diesel fuel which is more efficient. And the price of gas here is $6 a gallon to discourage guzzling. A lot of big ideas and innovations coming out of Europe. — Chris Cuomo

If you ever have a new idea, and it's really new, you have to expect that it won't be widely accepted immediately. It's a long hard process. — Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Essentially, not only do we believe in this myth of 'de-risking', but it has become the one overriding goal; de-risking above growth, de-risking above innovation, de-risking above everything else. And we've reached the point where the Fed is using $70 Billion a month to 'de-risk' a largely insolvent banking system. And this can only end badly. The idea that you can do capitalism without risk is ridiculous on its face. — Andreas Antonopoulos

Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation. — Vijay Govindarajan

Ultimately, innovation depends on the people with advanced skills who have the ideas, and on the business risk-takers willing to back them. — Anthony Pratt

Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon's founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old "gatekeepers" of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. "Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation," Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. "When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say 'that will never work!' And guess what - many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity. — Brad Stone

We need new ideas and new creativities to help address contemporary issues. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Throw an idea into the world and its impact will ripple and reverberate beyond your side of the shore. — A.E. Samaan

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs. — Bill Gates

Because the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation. — Erik Brynjolfsson