Quote

Author

Company

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Key

Viewpoints

Surprise to win! What innovations would excite your team, wow consumers, and shock competitors? Use your experience and intuition to pick the right project.

Vadim Kotelnikov

Innovarsity

There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will... More

Steve Jobs

Apple

The first test for any innovation portfolio is achieving the right balance between stretch and strategic fit. If you engage in hyperreactiveness thinking and continually react to the latest market or technological trend, rather than following a course until there is a significant reason to change, you’ll fail. The key to avoiding such short-term thinking is to maintain strategic alignment and test the assumptions that drive new products and service decisions as you make these choices.

Christopher Meyer

Center for Business Innovation, Cambridge

One of the things that is most important for a company is to be very clear about their strategy, so investors get to self-select as to whether or not that's the right strategy for them. I think we've done a very good job about being clear that we're a long-term focused company.

Jeff Bezos

Amazon.com

Jump to the next curve.

Guy Kawasaki

Truemors

We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company.

Google's 9 Notions of Innovation

Eric Schmidt

Google

Look wider. Don't focus too much on your competition – spend as much time learn from noncompetitive industries as well. Knowing the state of the art or the soon-to-be state of the art in one industry can give you a jump in your chosen field.

Tom Kelley

IDEO

It's through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we've always mapped our path at Dell. There's always an opportunity to make a difference.

Michael Dell

Dell Inc.

Mapping innovation activity gives you a sense of the terrain – the peaks and valleys in investments and actions.

Larry Keeley

Doblin

Employing people with diverse skills and talents helps us challenge the status quo when developing business strategies.

Hal Tovin

Citizens Financial Group

Even the best concepts of strategies tend to develop incrementally, They rarely ever work the first time out or unfold just as they were planned. In fact, the original concept or its execution usually gets changed considerably before it's ready to be implemented broadly.

Andrall Pearson

Harvard Business School

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.

Richard Branson

Virgin Group

Doing the things we do now and doing them better, cheaper and faster will take us so far. But it will not take us far enough. We're going to have to do new things in new ways.

Peter Bonfield

British Telecom