Quotes about Innovation

Dreamers dream about things being different. Visionaries envision themselves making a difference. Dreamers think about how nice it would be for something to be done. Visionaries look for an opportunity to do something.

One of our pastors, John Hambrick, has a saying that we've adopted organization-wide. He says, "We walk toward the messes." In other words, we don't feel compelled to sort everything or everyone out ahead of time. We are not going to spend countless hours creating policies for every eventuality.

What have we fallen in love with that's not as effective as it used to be? What do we love doing that's not really working? What's off limits for discussion? Do we have any "old couches" that need to be thrown out?

An unwillingness to accept risk has swamped more leaders than anything I can think of.

Keep in mind that everything you loathe about your current environment or organization was originally somebody's good idea.

If you spend your days doing what you love, it is impossible to fail. So I go about my days trying to bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. And then everyone gets furious about it. And then I sit back and say, 'I did that!'

First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product - the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

As humans, we've always innovated our way out of problems, whether it was the first torch to light a dark cave or the steam engine that sparked a revolution.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.