Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

Whole new businesses will emerge around breakthrough products as revolutionary technologies accelerate capitalism's creative destruction of slower industries.

Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a process of change. Every situation is being upset before it has had time to work itself out. Economic progress, in a capitalist society, means turmoil.

The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism... is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.

The perennial gale of creative destruction

Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. This is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur.

Capitalism historically has been a very dynamic force, and behind that force is technical progress, innovation, new ideas, new products, new technologies, and new methods of managing teams.

From computers to information technology to airplanes, it has been America's unique blend of republican government and free-market capitalism that has allowed us to surpass all other nations in history.

Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

Capitalism is not so much an aberration as a step on an evolutionary path, and one that contains within it some of the answers to its own contradictions.

I wonder how many people would have thought at the end of World War II that the capitalist system would be one that was meeting the challenges and making things better for people as we approach the 21st century.

The robber barons were a blessing to America. They got filthy rich but they took enormous risks and were entitled to get rich.

The essence of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth.

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

We live in a dynamic time, where the rate of change and the rate of innovation are very high. It’s not equal in all segments or sectors of the economy, but we are seeing a lot of innovation in certain sectors, and I expect that to continue.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.

Competition's a good thing.

The Internet free marketplace is defined by fierce competition. And that competition has transformed the world with innovation, investment, and what we need most of all right now: jobs.

With capitalism and prosperity came something new: the idea of progress. This is the notion that things are getting better and will continue to get better in the future.

No company has a permanent consumer franchise. No one has the only game in town. The never-ending cycle of destruction and change inherent in a capitalist economy always provides new opportunities for those with determination, goals and concentration.

Capitalism has brought with it progress, not merely in production but also in knowledge.

Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the 'gales of creative destruction' still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.

I call the age we are entering the creative age because the key factor propelling us forward is the rise of creativity as the primary mover of our economy.

Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.

Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress.