Innovation Timeline Quotes

When we first showed the Karma in January 2008, we had barely started the company.

We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn't surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.

There are cases when it takes 50 or 100 years for fundamental science to achieve results.

True innovation takes at least 10 to 15 years, whereas the longest that private venture capitalists are routinely willing to wait is five years. They don't join the game until all the riskiest plays have already been made - by governments.

By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical discovery and the moment when it is useful; and that this lapse of time can be anything from 30 to 100 years, in some cases even more; and that the whole system seems to function without any direction, without any reference to usefulness, and without any desire to do things which are useful.

People working on bigger ideas on a more protracted timeline will be more on the stealth side. They aren’t releasing new PR announcements every day. The bigger the secret and the likelier it is that you alone have it, the more time you have to execute. There may be far more people going after hard secrets than we think.

Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.

In fact, technology has been the story of human progress from as long back as we know. In 100 years people will look back on now and say, 'That was the Internet Age.' And computers will be seen as a mere ingredient to the Internet Age.

The most popular product 20 years from now, that everyone uses, has not been invented yet. That means that you're not late.

So we do software for watches, for phones, for TV sets, for cars. And some of these take a long time to catch on.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn't exist. TV didn't exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Projects can take years to exhibit proof-of-concept and a few more years to be converted into commercial realities.

Hype tends to precede the reality in biotech, but the reality does follow. Usually.

It's often hard to remember that the personal computing era is still quite young. It only dates from 1977, with the arrival of the first mass-market PCs.

What that means initially is that you have alot of products that are only slightly better games in the same genre on another machine - and the titles that really take advantage of the machine come along later.