Innovative Business Quotes

Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Reading is good, action is better.

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

A Manifesto for Introverts 1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers. 2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation. 3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths. 4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later. 5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters. 6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards. 7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk. 8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron. 9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional. 10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Once you achieve intimacy and connection, I predict that innovation, partnership, execution and success won't be far behind.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, "Does it do [x]?", "Do you plan to add [y]?". Finally Jobs said, "Wait wait — put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don't want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.

By harnessing the power of collective intelligence, boards of directors can make better decisions, drive innovation, and ensure the long-term success of their organizations.

Freedom in any moment is a product of two things: the autonomy you feel and the support for autonomy that the moment allows.

Remember your customers appreciate efficiency and convenience and those two become achievable through innovation and willingness to change with time.

When in doubt, simplify.

Competition helps you to be innovative and innovation is what keeps us going and moving from one civilization to another advanced civilization.

Being selfish in the business is a sure path to failure.

You need a product that can make their lives easier; a product that they need and can relate to as well.

The moment you will stop innovating, somebody else will make your product outdated and will become the market leader.

The path to innovation begins with curiosity

Success is not only dependent on understanding your own skill-set. It’s also important to recognize the talents of others and know how to profit from them.

Firestarters aren’t born lucky. They manufacture it.

Shaping the company's future requires a board that fosters a culture of innovation and agility to adapt to changing market conditions.

People do not thrive under tyrants, Alizayd; they do not come up with innovations when they're busy trying to stay alive, or offer creative ideas when error is punished by the hooves of a karkadann.

In this global economy of rapid change, innovation is not a nice-to-have anymore - it's a necessity. Every employee in the business needs to be innovation capable or innovation adaptive.

Collaborators don’t steal others’ ideas, take advantage of people, or sit back while others accomplish their tasks for them. Collaborators take action to ensure that everyone with whom they work can enjoy the maximum potential outcome.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.

... all too often, a successful new business model becomes the business model for companies not creative enough to invent their own. [2002] p.46

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation.

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes -- while no becoming an extremist. ... **Most companies don't do paradox very well.** (emphasis by author) [2002] p.25f

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

I believe that companies, as major employers, resource managers, technological innovators, and capital allocators, have a unique responsibility to operate with integrity, transparency, and accountability.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.

The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare.

One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

Corporate governance, in this century, must include exploring how ESG factors can drive innovation and product development.

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

By harnessing the power of collective intelligence and mutual support, mastermind alliances can unlock new levels of creativity, innovation, and success.

Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.

Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.

Engaged employees are more productive, innovative, and committed to the company's success. They become passionate advocates for your brand and contribute to a positive work environment that attracts and retains top talent.

A strong definition of business success often incorporates elements from several frameworks. A balanced approach might combine financial health with a commitment to innovation and social responsibility. This ensures the company remains profitable while considering its long-term impact and ethical obligations.

Effective consulting is about gathering and presenting actionable data, and helping businesses solve problems, implement solutions, and innovate.

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2

The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

If you want an incredibly passionate, happy, ALIVE business…don’t overcomplicate things. Once all is said and done, the foundational elements of a successful business are very simple: respect, service, value and sales. Comparatively, everything else is froth.

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

Certainty is fleeting, but through experimentation, systems innovation and trial-and-error, instructive patterns emerge as guidance.

To drive innovation, it’s a good idea to have bad ideas, and many of them.

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.

A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.

One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects.

As companies age they tend to become more reliant on extracting value from their past successes and less desirous of innovating. It's every CEO's job to ensure the company rejects this tendency and instead chooses to embrace both the capital of past success and the capital of present innovation.

If your company doesn't continue to innovate, your company isn't going to be around much longer.

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.

Come out of the don'ts and impossibles. Manifest your dream. Bloom your worth.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

Inflection points are moments when major shifts from one stage to another take place. They can be seen in social movements, technological innovations, and business transitions. Regardless of context, one cannot merely continue the same behavior after an inflection point.

You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

We kind of missed the boat on that," he recalled. " So we needed to catch up real fast." The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it find itself behind.

People who say "it's just business" are lying. It's a deceptive and manipulative tactic used by weak minds. Anyone who has ever run or been in business knows that a business will fail if the relationships are not healthy. Business is the business of relationships. That is all.

Look for patterns, and then ask why those patterns exist.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

In a world full of game players, the only way to set yourself apart is to be a game changer.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

For the most part, the best opportunities now lie where your competitors have yet to establish themselves, not where they're already entrenched. Microsoft is struggling to adapt to that new reality.

Financial health is the lifeblood of any organization. It's the engine that drives growth, innovation, and long-term sustainability. A company's financial performance determines its ability to invest in new products or services, attract and retain top talent, weather economic downturns, and ultimately, fulfill its mission.

One way to assess the viability of a business idea is to consider it's ability to be monetized. If something can't be monetized, it ain't a business. And if there's no path to profitability, then it has no worth.

A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked. A good question creates new territory of thinking. A good question reframes its own answers. A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics, and business. A good question is a probe, a what-if scenario. A good question skirts on the edge of what is known and not known, neither silly nor obvious. A good question cannot be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.  •

When we're able to communicate in nature's language; when we're able to transcend the view that nature is a boundless entity; even transcending the building as the kernel of the architectural project; when we invite scientific inquiry and technological innovation, fusing atoms with bits and bits with genes - only then will the art of building enable new forms of interaction between humans and their environment.

Those people who live in an Independent nation should know how important it is to support independence not only in the government but also in arts, literature, films, newspapers, and business. Innovation, growth, and self-motivation comes from independent artists, journalists, authors, and inventors; not from the Big What which has held 90% of the market since the 1900s. Encourage innovation by supporting the Indies. That's where new opportunities are found!

Companies that are made up of clusters of leaders will actually accelerate their growth by speeding up their rate of innovation as their competition pulls back, build better teams by investing in people while their rivals shrink training budgets, and pick up top talent as their industry peers lay people off. And so fast companies get that unsettling times are actually gifts for them and periods to get so far ahead of the competition that they can never catch up.

**New business concepts are always, always the product of lucky foresight.** That's right - the essential insight doesn't come out of any dirigiste planning process; it comes form some cocktail of happenstance, desire, curiosity, ambition and need. But at the end of the day, there has to be a degree of foresight -- a sense of where new riches lie. So radical innovation is always one part fortuity and one part clearheaded vision. [first-line bold by author] [2002] p.23

Under-slept employees are not, therefore, going to drive your business forward with productive innovation. Like a group of people riding stationary exercise bikes, everyone looks like they are pedaling, but the scenery never changes. The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal. This means you often must work longer and later into the evening, arrive home later, go to bed later, and need to wake up earlier, creating a negative feedback loop. Why try to boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do so in half the time on high? People often tell me that they do not have enough time to sleep because they have so much work to do. Without wanting to be combative in any way whatsoever, I respond by informing them that perhaps the reason they still have so much to do at the end of the day is precisely because they do not get enough sleep at night.

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.

The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi- cist and author, agrees: “I think it’s very important to be idle...people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.

Every innovation—technological, sociological, or otherwise—begins as a crusade, organizes itself into a practical business, and then, over time, degrades into common exploitation. This is simply the life cycle of how human ingenuity manifests in the material world. What goes forgotten, though, is that those who partake in this system undergo a similar transformation: people begin as comrades and fellow citizens, then become labor resources and assets, and then, as their utility shifts or degrades, transmute into liabilities, and thus must be appropriately managed.

So it was not superior thinkers, inventors or businesses that made Europe rich, but the fact that European elites were less successful in obstructing them... This is somewhat similar to our era of globalization. More countries, in more places, now have access to the sum of humanity's knowledge, and are open to the best innovations from other places... If progress is blocked in one place, many others will continue humanity's journey. (217-218)

The Profit function: Individual profits cause collective growth and prosperity. It is necessary for individual people and businesses to profit in a Permaculture Economy where justice is maintained and fairly applied. Profits are earned when efficiency is mastered. With profits, individuals invest in (a) new and innovative means of production which will allow more profits, or (b) buying products and services from other individuals who are also seeking profit by providing value. Profits also incentivize individuals to be productive participants in society to begin with. If there will be no profit in an activity, business or industry, then individuals will decline participation in that activity, business or industry. Since profits are only possible when buyers are satisfied with the productivity of sellers, then it is also true that an individuals willingness to participate in an activity, business or industry is preceded by the buyers satisfaction which allows the seller to profit. But when buyers are dissatisfied and decline participation, it forces sellers to decline participation. Inversely, if profits are eradicated through the force of price-controls by the government, then sellers will decline participation which then causes buyers to decline participation. And when both sellers and buyers decline participation, then whole industries and economies collapse.

Individual profits cause collective growth and prosperity. It is necessary for individual people, businesses, and companies to profit, in a Permaculture Economy where justice is maintained and fairly applied. Profits are earned when efficiency is mastered. With profits, individuals invest in (a) new and innovative means of production which will allow more profits, or (b) they use profits to buy products or services from other individuals who are also seeking profit by providing value. Profits also incentivize individuals to be productive to begin with. If there will be no profit in an activity, business or industry, then individuals will decline participation. Since profits are only possible when buyers are satisfied with the productivity of sellers, then it is also true that an individual's willingness to participate in an activity, business or industry is preceded by the buyers satisfaction which allows them to profit. So, when buyers decline participation it forces sellers to decline participation. Inversely, if profits are removed through force of price controls by the government, then sellers will decline participation which then causes buyers to decline participation.

Traditional competition forces us to take on an attitude of winning. A Worthy Rival inspires us to take on an attitude of improvement. The former focuses our attention on the outcome, the latter focuses our attention on process. That simple shift in perspective immediately changes how we see our own businesses. It is the focus on process and constant improvement that helps reveal new skills and boosts resilience. An excessive focus on beating our competition not only gets exhausting over time, it can actually stifle innovation.

One of his motivating passions was to build a lasting company. At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. " I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company," he recalled." The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. When i got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I would be useless without the company, and that's why I decided to stay and rebuild it.

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great art science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your customers have, on their own, figured out a way to turn it into a microwave.

The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind. And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality... Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich. New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research... It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was. In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business. They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers. And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment. Thus the attitude of pure scientists was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general. Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and whenever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels. But that is no longer true. There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations. The old days are gone. Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever. But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?