Quotes about Innovation

Make dumb suggestions.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

Trying to think of startup ideas doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

In practice I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something they thought ugly.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable.

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.