Innovation Disruption Quotes

There's a smugness that goes with being a huge company. The big fish say, 'If it's so great, why didn't we invent it?' But how'd you like to be makin' buggy whips when cars came along?

If horses had controlled investment decisions, there would have been no auto industry.

The change between horse and buggy to automobile is a big change and there hasn't been a major change since.

Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes.

There is no way to create wealth without ideas. Most new ideas are created by newcomers. So anyone who thinks the world is safe for incumbents is dead wrong.

I didn't appreciate, coming out of corporate America... what it meant to a founder, the creator of the Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.

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

Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption.

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.

My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.

The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.

I am not that concerned that innovation in some large scale sense will suddenly and abruptly shift from one part of the world to another.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

In an era of endless innovation and constant disruption, what is any company really worth? How does a startup determine its valuation?