Innovation Source Quotes

At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.

I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It's coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don't even know where they are.

The last people with any ideas are young people.

With the master, what is new and significant develops vigorously amid the 'manure' of contradictions out of the contradictory phenomena. The underlying contradictions themselves testify to the richness of the living foundation from which the theory itself developed. It is different with the disciple. His raw material is no longer reality, but the new theoretical form in which the master has sublimated.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education - I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.

All acts performed in the world begin in the imagination.

There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.

I know that God exists. I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as the culture could earn them. I give all the credit to God.

Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer.

Lots of creativity is and should be solitary.

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

I see people as the nucleus of a great idea that hasn't come to be yet.

So where do the ideas-the salable ideas-come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious.

Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.

It is always the older that emanates the new one.

American ingenuity and innovation seem to be so nimble in responding to difficult problems that one could speculate that the progressivism that so many critics claim has seized American schools is the very fountainhead for that creativity and innovation.

Fundamentally there is a narrative around where innovation can come out from.

Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing. No customer asked for electric lights. There was gas and gas mantles, which gave good light.

The best ideas I've had in my life are those I saw in my sleep, in the early morning.

Young people are the entrepreneurs of the future, and we should be looking to them as one of our sources of innovation for the high streets of tomorrow.

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.

Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.

I think a lot of developments start with the desire of the developer to get what he really wants so that he can use it. It's not just the technical fascination or the business opportunity.

We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies - in the minds of those closest to the work.