Quote

Author

Company

Most chief executives fervently want their companies to be more competitive, not just on one or two dimensions but across the board. Yet outstanding competitive performance remains remains an elusive goal. A few companies achieve it. Most do not.

Andrall Pearson

Harvard Business School

There are many parts of the whole field of innovation. All of these components are important. Yet approaching them piecemeal will bring piecemeal results... These seemingly disparate issues must be integrated into a single overarching strategy if they are to be mobilized in the quest for growth.

Robert B. Tucker

The Innovation Resource

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines... More

Steve Jobs

Apple

I see true innovation to be made up of three 'creativities' – creativity in technology, product planning, and marketing.

Akio Morita

Sony

The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself. As companies try to keep pace with rapid changes in technology and cope with increasingly unstable business environments, the research department has to do more than simply innovate new products. It must design the new technological and organizational architectures that makes possible a continuously innovating company.  Put another way, corporate research must reinvent innovation.

John Seely Brown

Xerox

A nearly universal misconception about innovation is that the ideal goal is to create the next hot product. That's why most companies focus their R&D dollars there. But because it's increasingly easy for other companies to copy any new product, you rarely get a return on those investments. So the principal thing we've done to encourage innovation is to help people to see there are actually many types of innovation – product innovation is one type, but so is innovation in customer service, in business models, in networking, and so on.

Larry Keeley

Doblin

Build bridges from one department to another, from your company to your prospective customers, and ultimately from the present to the future.

Tom Kelley

IDEO

The most important is to work with a multi-disciplinary team. You need perspectives from marketing, operations, finance, etc. to build new and innovative business models. It’s about breaking down the boundaries. Innovative business models touch all aspects of an organization.

Alexander Osterwalder