Quote

Author

Company

Innovation is about taking risk and learning from failure and market feedback.

Vadim Kotelnikov

Innovarsity

Corporate risk takers are very much like entrepreneurs. They take personal risks to make new ideas happen.

Gifford Pinchot III

Pinchot & Co

Don't be afraid to tread new ground, but do a sanity test.

Sabeer Bhatia

Hotmail

You also need to embrace an experimental attitude in making decisions. Sometime you can't wait for all the data to present themselves before making a decision. You have to make the best decision you possibly can based on your experience, intuition, available data, and assessment of risk. There's a guaranteed element of risk in any business, so experiment – but experiment wisely.

Michael Dell

Dell Inc.

Companies with a high awareness of culture's importance to innovation have visible, tangible, and frequently humorous reminders that it's okay to take risk – that a person won't be beheaded for sincere attempts that fail.

Ellen Peebles

Harvard Business School

It doesn’t matter how bright a person is. How smart a person is. If they don’t understand the risk emanating from what they are doing, if they are not suitably regulated and if greed overtakes them it is inevitable that one sees disasters because in the end systems are much more powerful than individuals.

Narayna Murthy

Infosys

So how do you encourage useful innovation? By doing two things. One you have to promote risk taking – be open to experimentation and philosophical about things that go wrong. My motto is, "Always make new mistakes." There's no shame in making a mistake. But then learn from it and don't make the same one again. Everything I've learned, I've learned by making mistakes.

Esther Dyson

EDventure Holdings

Risk is the backbone of new product development. It is the central core, the spinal cord, the brainstem. Companies are in the business of reducing risk and maximizing returns. But it is easy to forget that both need to be in balance. An both need to exist. Without risk, there is little potential reward. On the other hand, return potential drives management to develop and launch new products, but an aversion to risk impedes it from doing so. Ask yourself how many new product concepts have been killed not by the results of careful analysis or research but because of management's fear of risk.

Thomas D. Kuczmarski

Kuczmarski & Associates