Edwin Land Quotes

The young Steve Jobs had a hard time articulating something that didn't exist. He could see it, taste it, knew what it felt like, but he didn't have all the language because it hadn't been invented yet. People didn't fathom the personal computer on a mass produced level.

True genius can be identified by the fact that its expression changes the world into something it has never been before.

A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.

Somewhere in that 20-year period, I would assume that there will be some basically new approach that will begin to cut into it, but it's got a long time.

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.

Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.

An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.

I'm looking for people who are at the cutting edge of what they do, who think out-of-the-box. Even if their work is something common today, it might have been absolutely new when they started out, so we'd like to hear of their beginnings.

The term 'innovative' or 'innovation' is often vague or ambiguous. But in our definition, innovation means to make something which people think impossible possible.

The history of innovation is the story of ideas that seemed dumb at the time.

Everybody's trying to repeat the past with the new network, with new devices and new tools. Why not make something brand-new?

The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

I'm not the sort of fellow who does the same thing all the time. I began using a lot of science fiction apparatus. I came out with the atom bomb two years before it was actually used because I read in the paper that a fellow named Nicola Tesla was working on the atom bomb.

I intend to lay a foundation that will revolutionize the whole world.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

We're changing the world with technology.

The paperless office is possible, but not by imitating paper. Note that the horseless carriage did not work by imitating horses.

Talent shuffles the deck. Genius brings a new deck.

The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress.

Invention is by its very nature disruptive. If you want to be understood at all times, then don't do anything new.

Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority.

If there can be some paradigm shift thing that you can be part of, that's cool.