Janine Benyus Quotes

First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.

I never pick up an item without thinking of how I might improve it.

The technical process which is interesting in it's own right but I think the creative process is what's more intriguing to me.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don't follow a model that doesn't work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn't matter how good a cook you are.

Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.

For better or worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.

Creating is no problem - problem solving is not creating.

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful . . . Great designers also pursue a mission. Great designers design with mankind in mind . . . The crossroads of science and art, innovation and inspiration are what I love about design.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

The problem is not one of prediction. It is one of imagination.

Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

Design is a thinking process that starts in the head and with sketches. Thinking cannot be done by a computer.

Less money sometimes allows you to be more creative.

Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and, where appropriate, profits.

Creativity is a process more often than it is an event.

Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or 'improving' nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.

Creativity, not money, is used to solve problems.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, I never wanted toys; I wanted electrical parts so I could build things. And I was better at taking things apart and putting them back together, but I always had extra pieces left over, so I think it was an early warning that I was a better designer than an engineer.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.