Innovation
Making room for new ideas and better ways of working.
Leaders who emphasize innovation question how things are done, run experiments before the answer is clear, and treat a failed attempt as information. They protect time and people for work that may not pay off.
Quotes are tagged by what they are about, not by who said them. A quote here is not a rating of the speaker.
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
Verified sourceThe Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination · Watch at 14:32 · Harvard Gazette
14:32 of 23:51All quotes from this speech →
As delivered Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
Verified sourceThe Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination · Watch at 22:10 · Harvard Gazette
22:10 of 23:51All quotes from this speech →
As delivered We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.
I wanted to invent, design and make things, to control the whole process.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 4:19 · Dyson on YouTube
Rather than the glamour of computers or mobile phones, I've been interested in areas overlooked and out of fashion and there's nothing wrong with that.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 5:02 · Dyson on YouTube
Surprisingly, naivety is helpful. Experience can be a cage, inhibiting and hard to escape from. And today, the world changes so quickly that freedom from experience can be an asset.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 5:47 · Dyson on YouTube
Watch out for the 'experts', the boring 'know-It-alls'. Ignore the naysayers and the doubting Thomases.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 6:07 · Dyson on YouTube
I learned the art of iterative Research and Development, where you make just one change at a time.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 7:03 · Dyson on YouTube
You can learn more and viscerally from constantly experimenting and failing. Failure causes you to examine and overcome the problem. Getting it 'right first time' does not give you that same ingrained learning.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 7:54 · Dyson on YouTube
Be different. Embrace failure and discover your mojo. Believe in your ideas. Ignore the naysayers.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 10:05 · Dyson on YouTube
Through science, engineering, the arts, ideas and ingenuity, shape the world in your image for the better.
Verified sourceAddress to the Class of 2022 at the Opening of the Dyson STEAM Building · Watch at 10:15 · Dyson on YouTube
We were young, naive, idealistic, we didn't know what we didn't know about building the industry and about building our company. We didn't know that it was impossible. We just imagined how great it would be if computers would do what we imagined.
Verified source2009 Commencement Address at Oregon State University · Watch at 6:13 · Oregon State University on YouTube
Our fresh and innocent perspective, unencumbered by conventional wisdom allowed us to see what thirty, forty, fifty other companies could not and did not.
Verified source2009 Commencement Address at Oregon State University · Watch at 6:30 · Oregon State University on YouTube
MIT teaches you to think deeply, but it also teaches you to build, to test ideas, to keep going when the first experiment, or even the fifth experiment doesn't work.
Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 5:42 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube
Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time. It is taking the risk to work on something really hard. It's challenging yourself. It's choosing problems where you may not know the answer. It's surrounding yourself with people who make you better.
Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 13:03 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube
Ideas don't come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 11:33 · Harvard University on YouTube
If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 11:39 · Harvard University on YouTube
The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven't had ours. It prevents people with seeds of good ideas from getting started.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 11:54 · Harvard University on YouTube
It's good to be idealistic. But be prepared to be misunderstood. Anyone working on a big vision will get called crazy, even if you end up right.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 12:18 · Harvard University on YouTube
In our society, we often don't do big things because we're so afraid of making mistakes that we ignore all the things wrong today if we do nothing.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 12:53 · Harvard University on YouTube
The greatest successes come from having the freedom to fail.
Verified source2017 Commencement Address at Harvard University · Watch at 15:41 · Harvard University on YouTube
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Verified source2005 Stanford Commencement Address · Watch at 12:12 · Steve Jobs Archive on YouTube
12:12 of 14:26All quotes from this speech →
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Verified source2005 Stanford Commencement Address · Watch at 6:55 · Steve Jobs Archive on YouTube
6:55 of 14:26All quotes from this speech →
Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.
SourceThe Lyceum Address (1838) · via Wikiquote
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
SourceSecond State of the Union address (1862) · via Wikiquote
To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different; it takes something that's really new and really captures people's imagination, and the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.
SourceApple company event (October 1983) · via Wikiquote
When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
SourceFrom articles on Evan Carmichael's website · via Wikiquote
You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.
SourceSpotlight: Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba.com - Business - International Herald Tribune, by SONIA KOLESNIKOV-JESSOPJAN · via Wikiquote
We've had three big ideas at Amazon that we've stuck with for 18 years, and they're the reason we're successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.
SourceJeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper. September 2013 · via Wikiquote
Creating a new computing model is incredibly hard and rarely done in history.
Source2023 Commencement Address at National Taiwan University · Watch at 12:56 · Alive Industries on YouTube
We risked everything to pursue deep learning.
Source2023 Commencement Address at National Taiwan University · Watch at 15:46 · Alive Industries on YouTube
Every industry will be revolutionized, reborn, ready for new ideas, your ideas.
Source2023 Commencement Address at National Taiwan University · Watch at 19:39 · Alive Industries on YouTube
History shows that societies that retreat from technology do not stop progress. They only surrender the opportunity to shape it and to benefit from it.
Source2026 Commencement Address at Carnegie Mellon University · Watch at 11:43 · Carnegie Mellon University on YouTube
You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.
SourceLarry Page’s University of Michigan Commencement Address, 2009. · via Wikiquote
I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.
SourceJordan, Michael. I Can't Accept Not Trying · via Wikiquote
When I think about my career, my successes are built on learning from failures.
SourceBoy Genius Report: "When I think about my career, my successes are built on learning from failures: Microsoft CEO Satya… · via Wikiquote
You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.
SourceInterview with Inc. Magazine for its "The Entrepreneur of the Decade Award" (1 April 1989) · via Wikiquote
A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
SourceInterviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (February 1996) · via Wikiquote
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.
SourceInterviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing (February 1996) · via Wikiquote
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
SourceQuoted in Steve Jobs, the Journey Is the Reward (1988) by Jeffrey S. Young · via Wikiquote
The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.
SourceAs quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004) · via Wikiquote
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
SourceAs quoted in Fortune (9 November 1998); also quoted in "TIME digital 50" in TIME digital archive (1999) · via Wikiquote
But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.
SourceAs quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004) · via Wikiquote
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
SourcePlayboy interview (1985) · via Wikiquote
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
SourceAs quoted in Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley (2001) by Christine Finn. p. 90 · via Wikiquote
Discontent is the first necessity of progress.
SourceThe Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 110 · via Wikiquote
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
SourceAs quoted in Behavior-Based Robotics (1998) by Ronald C. Arkin. p. 8 · via Wikiquote
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.
SourceThe Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 110 · via Wikiquote
Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.
SourceThe Quotable Walt Disney (2001) · via Wikiquote
I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.
SourceAs quoted in Success (2003) by Ariel Books · via Wikiquote
I believe in being an innovator.
SourceAs quoted in Cult of the Mouse · via Wikiquote
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
SourceFrom a speech given at the Royal Academy of Art in 1953; quoted in Time magazine (11 May 1954). · via Wikiquote
As our case is new, we must think and act anew.
It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones.
We know that the nation that goes all-in on innovation today will own the global economy tomorrow. This is an edge America cannot surrender.
Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
The way to be successful in the software world is to come up with breakthrough software, and so whether it's Microsoft Office or Windows, its pushing that forward. New ideas, surprising the marketplace, so good engineering and good business are one in the same.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
Philanthropy should be taking much bigger risks that business. If these are easy problems, business and government can come in and solve them.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation.
Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas but the image is that they all come from the top - I'm afraid that's not quite right.
The tool that's most associated with the recent progress against malaria is the long-lasting bed net. Bed nets are a fantastic innovation. But we can do even better. We can invent new ways to control the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite.
The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure.
I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'
I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
If you're entering anything where there's an existing marketplace, against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. It can't be a little bit better, because then you put yourself in the shoes of the consumer... you're always going to buy the trusted brand unless there's a big difference.
The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.
The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.
I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.
My vision is for a fully reusable rocket transport system between Earth and Mars that is able to re-fuel on Mars - this is very important - so you don't have to carry the return fuel when you go there.
The space shuttle was often used as an example of why you shouldn't even attempt to make something reusable. But one failed experiment does not invalidate the greater goal. If that was the case, we'd never have had the light bulb.
There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.
You can't do it unless you can imagine it.
For 'Star Wars' I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography.
None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for 'Indiana Jones.' Nobody in their right mind thought 'American Graffiti' or 'Star Wars' would work.
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done.
We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.
Trust the young people; trust this generation's innovation. They're making things, changing innovation every day. And all the consumers are the same: they want new things, they want cheap things, they want good things, they want unique things. If we can create these kind of things for consumers, they will come.
When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.
If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.
If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.
I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you're going to innovate.
It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.
If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.
My view is there's no bad time to innovate.
The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'
I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.
If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.
I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.
Because, you know, resilience - if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities.
One of the things that I'm very excited about with New Shepard, which is our suborbital tourism vehicle, is using that to get a lot of practice. One of the equilibria that we're at today with space launch is that we don't get to practice enough.
The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.
I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.
Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.
You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.
I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.
I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I've tried to really stress that.
We're at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity... Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That's boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don't exist.
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.
You can't be afraid to fail. It's the only way you succeed - you're not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.
What I've learned is that if you really want to be successful at something, you'll find that you put the time in. You won't just ask somebody if it's a good idea, you'll go figure out if it's a good idea.
Traditional TV will have to innovate their TV delivery software in new ways beyond just offering their content in an app in order to change the viewing erosion of TV.
Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it's not the job of their customers to know what they don't. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don't spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed.
Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have.
Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.
When you've got 10,000 people trying to do the same thing, why would you want to be number 10,001?
All TV is now digital. It's a platform ripe for innovation; we just haven't seen any beyond picture quality changes. That's a secular problem.
The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook - they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing - so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.
Hackathons are these things where just all of the Facebook engineers get together and stay up all night building things. And, I mean, usually at these hackathons, I code too, just alongside everyone.
This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.
Open Graph is a language for structuring content and sharing that goes on in other apps, and we're continuing to build it out longer term. But we found we need to build more specific experiences around categories like music or movies. Where we've taken the time to build those specific experiences, stuff has gone quite well.
There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.
What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.
Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
People love photos. Photos originally weren't that big a part of the idea for Facebook, but we just found that people really like them, so we built out this functionality.
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.
One of the things that we're trying to do with Creative Labs and all our experiences is explore things that aren't all tied to Facebook identity. Some things will be, but not everything will have to be, because there are some sets of experiences that are just better with other identities.
When Facebook was getting started, nothing used real identity - everything was anonymous or pseudonymous - and I thought that real identity should play a bigger part than it did.
I'm very inspired by nature - you could say Mother Nature. I look at things around me and get all kinds of inspiration daily.
I can keep learning about all the different technologies. It's my most telling characteristic. I'm interested in trying anything new.
I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at is a great opportunity for ideas.
Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse.
In New York, I get a tremendous amount of ideas by looking at the paintings and the sculptures, adapting artistic endeavors to crafts. There is a lot of inspiration around us that we can see every day and turn into projects.
Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.
The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that's always been my philosophy.
You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.
A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.
So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.
The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.
Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.
We, we - as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.
At Virgin, we have always backed the power of the entrepreneur and inventor to find solutions to tricky problems. Why should climate change and the battle against carbon be any different?
Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.
There's an inherent danger in letting people think that they have perfected something. When they believe they've 'nailed it,' most people tend to sit back and rest on their laurels while countless others will be labouring furiously to better their work!
You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.
And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.
Well, the odds must be against anybody being able to fly around the world in a balloon on the first attempt. All of us who are attempting to go around the world in balloons are effectively flying in experimental craft because these craft cannot be tested.
With Virgin, I've just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.
It's our own ability to have an idea and go after the idea and make it happen. That's what at the end of the day defines us.
Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future.
If you don't have a real stake in the new, then just surviving on the old - even if it is about efficiency - I don't think is a long-term game.
We've had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It's going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.
We are going to completely change what it means to do advanced analytics with our data solutions. We have machine-learning stuff that is about really bringing advanced analytics and statistical machine learning into data-science departments everywhere.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula.
Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.
It's not about the failure, it's about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.
If you don't jump on the new, you don't survive.
A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.
I want the least number of decision makers. We want to empower people to get more things done and also give permission to question orthodoxy.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.
Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'.
If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.
I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don't have a short-term payback.
What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think 'outside the box,' people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we're going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product - the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.
The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we're going to reinvent the phone.
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.
This is what customers pay us for - to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it.
Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: 'Oh, that's just the way things are done around here.' Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.
The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.
We want to reinvent the phone. What's the killer app? The killer app is making calls! It's amazing how hard it is to make calls on most phones. We want to let you use contacts like never before - sync your iPhone with your PC or mac.
Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.
It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.
The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.
But Apple really beats to a different drummer. I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.
Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.
We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject. But it's hard, because everybody has style. You can't help it.
The only time I have a good hunch the audience is going to be there is when I make the sequel to 'Jurassic Park' or I make another Indiana Jones movie. I know I've got a good shot at getting an audience on opening night. Everything else that is striking out into new territory is a crap shoot.
I think every movie I've made after 'Indiana Jones,' I've tried to make every single movie as if it was made by a different director, because I'm very conscious of not wanting to impose a consistent style on subject matter that is not necessarily suited to that style. So I try to re-invent my own eye every time I tackle a new subject.
I once said that CGI makes you less inventive. At the time I was bemoaning the loss of the practical stunt. If a stunt can be done practically and safely, I'd rather do it old-style.
You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.
Android was intended to be very customizable. And we welcome innovations.
There's a way to do it better - find it.
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.
Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem.
If you embrace that the things that you can do are limitless, you can put your ding in the universe. You can change the world.
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.
When we launch a product, we're already working on the next one. And possibly even the next, next one.
Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn't know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can't imagine your life without it. And you can count on Apple doing that.
I'd rather Apple cannibalize Apple than somebody else cannibalize Apple.
Market in India is big enough for several brands. For us, it's about innovation, making best product, and making the ecosystem better and better. If we do that well, then more people will switch from Android to iOS.
We didn't make the first mp3, smartphone, or tablet. But you can say we made the first modern mp3, smartphone, and tablet. And I think now we're making the first modern smartwatch.
You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.
I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don't work.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year.
It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.
Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.
No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.
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