INNOVATION QUOTES
quotations about innovation
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to General Thaddeus Kosciusko, May 2, 1808
Innovation is more than having new ideas: it includes the process of successfully introducing them or making things happen in a new way. It turns ideas into useful, practicable and commercial products or services.
JOHN ADAIR
Effective Innovation
The innovators are "venturesome," and in their social relationships cosmopolite. They travel in a circle of venturesomeness and spread new ideas, like circuit riders who spread the gospel.
MORRIS I. STEIN
Stimulating Creativity: Individual Procedures
Do not get obsolete like an old technology, keep innovating yourself.
SUKANT RATNAKAR
Open the Windows
Innovation is new stuff that is made useful.
MAX MCKEOWN
The Truth About Innovation
All innovation is new life.
ROBERT GRACEY
attributed, Day's Collacon
As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao tse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.
HENRY MILLER
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Throughout history, people with new ideas--who think differently and try to change things--have always been called troublemakers.
RICHELLE MEAD
Shadow Kiss
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen--and thinking what nobody has thought.
ALBERT SZENI-GYORGYI
attributed, The Executive's Book of Quotations
Innovators are usually open to ideas and are willing to experiment and take educated chances. Their opposites are the bottleneckers, who resist or oppose new proposals regardless of origin, unless they originated the idea. Bottleneckers are easily identified by the way in which they can talk an idea into oblivion before it has been thoroughly reviewed.
WILLIAM D. SCHMIDT & DONALD ARTHUR RIECK
Managing Media Services: Theory and Practice
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
preface, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a 'resource' until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.
PETER DRUCKER
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
VOLTAIRE
Philosophical Dictionary
One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.
COCO CHANEL
Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
speech, January 27, 1838
Most new things are not good, and die an early death; but those which push themselves forward and by slow degrees force themselves on the attention of mankind are the unconscious productions of human wisdom, and must have honest consideration, and must not be made the subject of unreasoning prejudice.
THOMAS BRACKETT REED
North American Review, December 1902
You have to be prepared to make your innovation obsolete.
PETER DRUCKER
"Peter's Principles", Context Magazine, spring 1998
Every innovation disturbs more by its novelty, than benefits by its utility.
GEORGE FREDERICK WHARTON
Legal Maxims, with Observations and Cases
Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
JEFF BEZOS
TED Talk, 2007