Innovation Cycle Quotes

The perennial gale of creative destruction

At the point that an idea approaches perfection, fashion and expectations surge ahead, leaving the innovator with considerable room to find further improvements.

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it's really really hard to predict those. I don't believe anyone can.

We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.

Invention breeds invention.

Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.

Technology moves so fast and social media moves so fast because everyone wants the new thing, but also, everyone wants to be where their parents are not. Once the mom got a Facebook and a Twitter and an Instagram, I don't want to be there anymore.

If you think about the history of mobile handsets, in many respects there was a time when Asia and then Europe all led North America.

Every technological revolution takes about 50 years.

Technology has the shelf life of a banana.

I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again. I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations.

Every two years, to keep Moore's Law happening, you have to invent... That's where I grew up.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

We work in an industry where people invent technology to avoid what we create.

I think people have an appetite for VR at $200, $300, $400. It's something so new and improves so quickly, people do have an appetite to buy that. If people are getting a new VR headset every two or three years that's incredibly improved, you want to go do that.

That's how we're going to stay innovative. We're going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.'

Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph devised than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found. The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for his balloon.

We had seen the way the print industry had been disrupted; we'd seen how the audio industry got disrupted, so it just seemed like a natural progression that video was next. We thought we were late to the game in 2003.

Fixing mistakes is one thing. Apple's bigger strength has been its ability to keep improving hit products.

And because technology is moving so rapidly, things become obsolete very, very quickly. In 15 years time, Will Caster is probably going to be in some weird room in Vegas where people are plugging quarters into him. Who has a mini-disc of a laser disc player? It's over!

Nobody has a guaranteed position in computer technologies business. We've done some good work, but all of these products become obsolete so fast and the structure of the business as it broadens out is going to be so different.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

You get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.

Every generation’s breakthroughs are proven false by the next generation’s Technology