To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope.
These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist.
Innovation- any new idea-by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience.
The best big idea is only going to be as good as its implementation.
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.
Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas.
A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action.
One of the chief inhibitions to human progress arises because of the extreme slowness with which the advances in knowledge become translated into action for the benefit of society as a whole. There is no step more important for the removal of that inhibition than that of providing for intimate contact between the leaders in the fields of pure and applied science.
The revolution that's required isn't a revolution of radical ideas, but the implementation of ideas we already have.
That's the new way - with computers, computers, computers. That's the way we can have the cell survive and get some new information in high resolution. We started about five years ago and, today, I think we have reached the target.
Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.
Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.
Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.
