12 Idea-Inspiring Quotes

SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION

Gary Hamel, founder, Strategos

“Innovation is hard. It really is, because most people don’t get it… the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new. Most of us understand that innovation is enormously important. It’s the only insurance against irrelevance. It’s the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It’s the only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.”

#dontwait

“Mindless  habitual  behavior  is  the  enemy  of  innovation.”

#dontwait

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

“Learning  and  innovation  go  hand  in  hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be  sufficient  for  tomorrow.”

William Pollard, physicist

#dontwait

“One big part of innovation is being willing to step outside of your comfort zone and take a risk. Every new idea is not successful right out of the gate, but if you’re not willing to take a chance, you’ll never know if your idea has staying power.”

Alyssa Gregory, founder, Small Business Bonfire

#dontwait

“The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

David Brooks, New York Times Columnist

#dontwait

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship - the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

Peter Drucker, management expert

#dontwait

“We used to write this down by saying, ‘move fast and break things.’ And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough. I think there’s probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes.”

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook

#dontwait

“After years of telling corporate citizens to ‘trust the system,’ many companies must relearn instead to trust their people – and encourage their people to use neglected creative capacities in order to tap the most potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

#dontwait

“There’s always an element of chance and you must be willing to live with that element. If you insist on certainty, you will paralyze yourself.”

J.P. Getty, Getty Oil Company

#dontwait

“It’s the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic which causes the wooliness and confusion around the term ‘innovation’. Everybody wants to be innovative; many companies and ideas are proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that innovation is a money spinner. And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.” James Dyson, founder, Dyson

#dontwait

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

General George Patton

#dontwait

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”

Charles Kettering, founder, Delco

#dontwait

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Charles Kettering, founder, Delco