quotes

=**Quotes on CREATIVITY and INNOVATION**=

"After the age of efficiency in the 1950s and 1960s, quality in the 1970s and 1980s, and flexibility in the 1980s and 1990s, we now live in an age of innovation." (Janszen, 2000, p. 3)

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking."
== — Walter Lippman "Capital isn't so important in business. Experience isn't so important. You can get both these things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn't any limit to what you can do with your business and your life." — Harvey Firestone "Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart." — Mencius (Meng-Tse), 4th century BCE "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 "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 "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." — Albert von Szent-Gyorgy "To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." — Albert Einstein Without the playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." — Carl Jung "To be creative you have to contribute something different from what you've done before. Your results need not be original to the world; few results truly meet that criterion. In fact, most results are built on the work of others." — Lynne C. Levesque // Breakthrough Creativity // "We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T. S. Eliot "The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail." — Edwin H. Land "Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual." — Arthur Koestler "There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns." — Edward de Bono "Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found." — James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen." — Carl Ally "The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—re the primary sources of creativity." — Margaret J. Wheatley "Too much of our work amounts to the drudgery of arranging means toward ends, mechanically placing the right foot in front of the left and the left in front of the right, moving down narrow corridors toward narrow goals. Play widens the halls. Work will always be with us, and many works are worthy. But the worthiest works of all often reflect an artful creativity that looks more like play than work." — James Ogilvy "Innovation— any new idea—by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires // courageous patience // ." — Warren Bennis "The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions." — Anthony Jay "Success is on the far side of failure." — Thomas Watson Sr. "To have a great idea, have a lot of them." — Thomas Edison "An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work." — Charles Kettering "Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport." — Robert Wieder "Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration." — Thomas Edison " // Creativity // is thinking up new things. // Innovation // is doing new things." — Theodore Levitt "Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form." — Watts Humprey "Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote." — Grover Cleveland, 1905 "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" — Harry M. Warner, Warner Bros Pictures, 1927 "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." — Robert Miliham, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923 "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible." — Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895 "The horse is here today, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad." — President of Michigan Savings Bank advising against investing in the Ford Motor Company "Video won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." — Daryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, commenting on television in 1946 "What use could the company make of an electric toy?" — Western Union, when it turned down rights to the telephone in 1878 "Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation." — Peter Drucker "Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions" — Albert Einstein "I roamed the countryside searching for the answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plant and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it and why immediately on its creation the lightening becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged my thought throughout my life." — Leonardo da Vinci "Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren't there before." — Margaret J. Wheatley // Leadership and the New Science // "A person might be able to play without being creative, but he sure can't be creative without playing." — Kurt Hanks and Jay Parry "The achievement of excellence can occur only if the organization promotes a culture of creative dissatisfaction." — Lawrence Miller "[I]in 1913, the first assembly line was implemented at Ford Motor Company. The process grew like a vine and eventually spread to all phases of the manufacture of Ford cars, and then through the entire world of heavy industry. There can be no doubt that a powerful revolution occurred at Highland Park—but it was not the assembly line itself that provided the power. Rather, it was the creation of an atmosphere in which improvement was the real product: a better, cheaper, Model T followed naturally. Every man on the payroll was invited to contribute ideas, and the good ones were implemented without delay." — Douglas Brinkley // Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and A Century of Progress // "Imagination is more important than knowledge."  — Albert Einstein // On Science // "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties." — Erich Fromm "If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original." — Sir Ken Robinson ==