Tag Archives: Jeff DeGraff

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 27, 2012


“So healthy paranoia is the friend of innovation. Complacency is the enemy – be ruthless in driving it out of your business.”

– Kevin McFarthing


“There are Nine Innovation Roles that need to be filled on every innovation project team, and filled well, for each individual innovation effort to be successful – and the skills necessary to be successful in each role should be cultivated in the organization.”

– Braden Kelley


“Variation, or hedging as it’s called in the venture capital community, is essential because it accelerates the failure cycle and quickens the discovery of the valuable solution. Innovation requires deviation; deviation requires deviants.”

– 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!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Quotes of the Day – May 26, 2012


“Senior leaders, who are typically charged with the efficient operation of the enterprise and rewarded as such, don’t fully understand how specific practices produce or destroy the value of innovation. As a result they often put the wrong people in charge of their innovation initiatives.”

– Jeff DeGraff


“Innovation is a team sport and everyone is innovative in their own way. Hopefully when you look at The Nine Innovation Roles it reinforces that you too can contribute to innovation success and that the lone innovator myth is just that – a myth.”

– Braden Kelley


“Innovators need bold ideas and clear thinking that come from an engaged brain, and bold actions and confidence, as well as empathy, that come from a big heart. They need courage to confront all that faces them in an existing business as usual culture. They need determination to face the faceless but seemingly powerful corporate culture and the slings and arrows thrown by the people who don’t want change or are afraid of change.”

– Jeffrey Phillips


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!

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.