Innovation & Creativity Quotes

The list below displays the most recent creativity quotes added to this online database. If you want to view quotes by topic, please use the quote search tools on the right side of this page. You can view quotes by category, or search by key words or author.

"All new ideas begin in a non-conforming mind that questions some tenet of the conventional wisdom."

-- H. G. Rickover

5/30/2007

"The best way to kill creativity in a team is letting the boss speak first"

-- Victoria Holtz

5/23/2007

"The ability to innovate is only as good as how one can accept changes and take risks."

-- Franco Paolo Liu Eisma

10/31/2006

"Creative thinking ability facilitates the ability to realize innovations"

-- Emem Ite

8/3/2006

"The practice of R&D involves making mistakes, realizations, corrections, and more mistakes. Trial and error is a fundamental part of the process. Too many managers in corporate America learn to avoid invention and new thinking because they have been convinced that their careers depend upon not making mistakes."

-- Tom Huff

5/23/2006

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

-- Walter Lippman

5/12/2006

"Managing and innovation did not always fit comfortably together. That's not surprising. Managers are people who like order. They like forecasts to come out as planned. In fact, managers are often judged on how much order they produce. Innovation, on the other hand, is often a disorderly process. Many times, perhaps most times, innovation does not turn out as planned. As a result, there is tension between managers and innovation."

-- Lewis Lehro, about the first years at 3M

5/12/2006

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones."

-- John Cage

5/12/2006

"One should never impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself."

-- Albert Einstein

5/12/2006

"Despite all the pro-innovation rhetoric that one encounters in annual reports and CEO speeches, most still hold the view that innovation is a rather dangerous diversion from the real work of wringing the last ounce of efficiency out of core business processes. Innovation is fine so long as it does not disrupt a company’s finely-honed operating model... As change becomes ever less predictable, companies will pay an ever-escalating price for their lopsided love of incrementalism."

-- Gary Hamel

2/28/2006

"Most 'new' business concepts are simply self-referring. They do not move beyond the rules of a certain way of doing capitalism, and therefore they cannot possibly alter the problems they target. Instead, just the opposite occurs — the status quo overpowers new ideas and turns them into variations on the same old themes. That is why every innovation from quality circles to reengineering to customer relationships turns out to be another road to cost reduction."

-- Shoshana Zuboff

2/28/2006

"A focus on cost-cutting and efficiency has helped many organizations weather the downturn, but this approach will ultimately render them obsolete. Only the constant pursuit of innovation can ensure long-term success."

-- Daniel Muzyka, Sauder School of Business, Univ. of British Columbia

11/8/2005

"Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space. We argue that beating the competition within the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create profitable growth."

-- W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy

11/8/2005

"Beware of the tyranny of making small changes to small things. Rather, make big changes to big things."

-- Roger Enrico, former chairman, Pepsico

11/8/2005

"The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B."

-- James Yorke, mathematician

11/8/2005

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

-- Michelangelo

11/8/2005

"Never innovate to compete, innovate to change the rules of the game."

-- David O. Adeife

8/5/2005

"Wealth flows directly from innovation… not optimization… wealth is not gained by perfecting the known."

-- Kevin Kelly

6/22/2005

"An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction."

-- Peter Drucker

6/22/2005

"Creativity methods provide senior management with a unique tool to tap into a massive organizational resource. Learning to leverage the creative thinking skills of every individual, regardless of their level, creates the sustainable competitive advantage every corporation is striving for."

-- Jim O'Neal

6/22/2005