For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness.
A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.
Singapore and China, which don't want to encourage democratic citizenship, are expanding their humanities curricula. These reforms are all about developing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.
We begin to change the world when we stimulate long-term prosperity using technology. There is not a problem that's large enough that innovation and entrepreneurship can't solve.
To gain customer insights, we must understand that we are prisoners of what we know and what we believe.
Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.
One of the enemies of creativity and innovation, especially in relation to our own development, is common sense.
Innovation is only innovation when it's sustainable.
Lab to land - how to get what is done in the lab to the land, to the farmer.
The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.
By venturing into space, we improve life for everyone here on Earth - scientific advances and innovations that come from this kind of research create products we use in our daily lives.
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 All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar. . . Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.
I was blown away when I figured out that none of the great integrative moves that I studied came as a result of starting with a blank sheet of paper - as many innovation coaches suggest. Integrative solutions came directly from mining the existing models for the best of their nuggets. So I never start with a blank sheet of paper anymore.
Innovations never happen as planned.
The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time. )
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.