Category Archives: Quotes

Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 6, 2012


“It isn’t the incompetent who destroy an organization. The incompetent never get in a position to destroy it. It is those who achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up.”

– F.M. Young


“Any disruptive innovation requires a company to imagine for the customer something they can then imagine for themselves. Go too far past your customers’ ability to imagine how the new product or service solves a real problem in their lives, and your adoption will languish.”

– Braden Kelley


“History can’t give attention to what’s been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success.”

– Scott Berkun


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 5, 2012


“Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.”

– George Kneller


“However, the large changes generated by disruptive innovation, often come from the imagination, and so these leaps forward for the business often disrupt not only the market but the internal workings of the organization as well – they also require a lot of explanation.”

– Braden Kelley


“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything.”

– George Lois


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 4, 2012


“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

– Sir Ken Robinson


“Innovation is about change. Companies that successfully innovate in a repeatable fashion have one thing in common – they are good at managing change.”

– Braden Kelley


“Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart.”

– Mencius (Meng-Tse), 4th century BC


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 3, 2012


“When all think alike, then no one is thinking.”

– Walter Lippman


“When it comes to creating an innovation culture, often people make it far too complicated. If you’re part of the senior leadership team and you’re serious about innovation then your job is simple – reduce friction.”

– Braden Kelley


“Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said could not be done.”

– Sam Ewing


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 2, 2012


“Visionary people are visionary partly because of the very great many things they don’t see.”

– Berkeley Rice


“To innovate for the future present, you must maintain the flexibility to tweak branding and messaging (and even the product or service itself) should some of the forecast customer insights prove to be inaccurate and require updates.”

– Braden Kelley


“Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – June 1, 2012


“All our dreams can come true if we have the desire to pursue them.”

– Walt Disney


“The product or service are an expression of the customer insights, and it is the useful life of the insights that we are concerned with, not the useful life of the product or service (a post-purchase concept). When the insights reach their sell by date, sales will begin to tail off, and you better have another product or service ready to replace this one (based on fresh insights).”

– Braden Kelley


“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”

– Katharine Hepburn


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 31, 2012


“Every bursted bubble has a glory! Each abysmal failure makes a point! Every glowing path that goes astray, shows you how to find a better way. So every time you stumble never grumble. Next time you’ll bumble even less! For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!”

– From the movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”


“You can’t really innovate for the past (your offering won’t be innovative and will be beaten easily by competitors). If you innovate for the future, then adoption will be slow until customers become ready. The trick is to task your insights team to provide guidance for the future present.”

– Braden Kelley


“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”

– Dr. Linus Pauling
– submitted by Khululeka Khumalo


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 30, 2012


“Leaders need to ambidextrous and have the range to move through the organization to connect the dots of innovation. Most organizations have tremendous innovation capabilities concentrated in businesses or locations but often lack high practiced leaders who can move between them.”

– Jeff DeGraff


“Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend.”

– Braden Kelley


“Look around you, everything that you see at some point had someone say “that is just impossible!”, “it will never happen!” And yet we have innovated beyond belief and continue to do so.”

– Linda Bernardi


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 29, 2012


“If you get people to ‘freely’ talk about innovation, its importance, its impact and can ‘paint’ the future in broad brush strokes, they achieve a growing clarity and enthusiasm and that often missing critical component – a sense of shared identity.”

– Paul Hobcraft


“The United States leads the world in innovation because it has created the perfect storm of a risk tolerant citizenry, where failure is sometimes a badge of honor, and a government that invests in basic research, helps to commercialize it, and for the most part tends to go out of the way from a regulatory standpoint.”

– Braden Kelley


“Organizations love to run the aforementioned innovation processes through the middle of the enterprise which is designed to eliminate variation. Think about your metrics, hurdle rates and stage-gate systems and it becomes clear that these practices are designed to created stability through standards, policies and similar controls. Innovation moves from the outside of the bell curve, where risk and reward are reversed, and moves to middle over time.”

– Jeff DeGraff


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 28, 2012


“The more successful an organization becomes the bigger it gets. The bigger it gets the more it focuses on optimizing its resources. The more it optimizes it resources the more it eliminates variation. Innovation requires variation. We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

– Jeff DeGraff


“It is in identifying which of The Nine Innovation Roles are vacant (or sub-optimally filled) that you will be able to see some of the areas where your efforts are likely to come up short, and then can take actions to improve your chances of innovation success.”

– Braden Kelley


“It is not enough to simply go through the motions. In order to build our abilities, cognitive or otherwise, we must think about what we’re doing, concentrate while we’re doing it and then review what we have done. Further, we need to seek out mentors and peers who will critique our efforts.”

– Greg Satell


What are some of your favorite innovation quotes?

Add one or more to the comments, listing the quote and who said it, and I’ll share the best of the submissions as future innovation quotes of the day!

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