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Hell, there are no rules here--we're trying to accomplish something.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

You can hire good people. You can ask for big ideas. But if you don't create an environment where good people can nurture and grow their big ideas, you might as well kiss your competitive advantage goodbye.

When you are faced with a decision - always chose the bolder option. The most extraordinary things are created by ordinary people.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

[this push for creativity], it's all so completely phony. Look at education: There's this horrible homogenization going on - everybody has got to be special. So if it's somebody's birthday in grade school, then you have to celebrate everybody's birthday, all year long. Everyone gets absolutely equal treatment; nobody is allowed to stick out—whether it's because they are behaving badly or are brilliantly smart. Everyone has to be of equal value intellectually, artistically, and creatively; it makes me want to scream. There's this irrepressible drive toward mediocrity; everything seems to be degenerating into a kind of middlebrow "world-class."

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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No more than 10 or 15 percent of innovations move up to that founder's wishes. Another 15, 20, or 30 percent are not disastrous, but not successes either. Five years later they'll say that this is a nice specialty. You know what that means, don't you? It means you have to wrap it in a five-dollar bill to give it away. Sixty percent are footnotes at best. Timing is also important. An invention may not succeed, but 10 years later someone else does the same thing, but gives it a slight twist and it clicks. Sometimes strategies are more important than the innovation itself. The trouble is that you rarely get a second chance.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Nearly 100% of innovation -- from business to politics -- is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.

The mantra that we have all lived with for the past five years is, "Innovate or die!" But it's just as accurate to say, "Innovate and die." All the excitement about all things new obscured the fact that most new ideas are bad and most old ideas are good. It's a Darwinian principle: The death rate of new products and companies is dramatically higher than that of old ones. Dozens of new cereals fail every year, while Cheerios and Wheaties persist. Even wildly popular new products such as Beanie Babies fade, while Play-Doh remains on the scene. Still, the world does change, new technologies are developed, business models do mutate, and customer demands do migrate. So the question becomes, Which horn would you rather be gored by? That's the innovator's dilemma. You can't choose between innovative work and routine work. That's like asking, What's more important: your heart or your brain?

Leaders pay a lot of lip service to the notion of rewarding failure, but few organizations hold failed effort on the same level with success. Often, they have a forgive-and-forget policy. Forgiveness is crucial, but it's not enough. In order to learn from mistakes, it's even more important to forgive and remember. The only kind of failure that deserves to be punished is inaction.

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

The major argument for value innovation is that it tends to be far more profitable than "me too" launches or the introduction of products that claim marginal improvement on the original. While the latter categories make up some 86% of overall new product launches, they only account for 62% of increased revenue and 39% of increased profits. Meanwhile value innovations, which only represent 14% of overall new product launches, represent 38% of increased revenue and 61% of increased profits.

Experience enables people to understand and internalize ideas.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.

The fundamental distinction between a platform or line extension product and a breakthrough product is that the latter establishes a need by its mere existence, or establishes an entirely new product category.

What is the biggest obstacle to creativity? Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass.

Stronger than all the armies on earth is an idea whose time has come.

Once you have your own market space and imitators follow, you go into classical competitive strategy mode, where you focus on milking it, getting your best market share, blocking other imitations and dramatically ramping up and refining your offering. But, as other companies' strategies converge on your market, history shows you need to create new market space again and break away.

The problem with the way we teach is that if a student makes a comment in class that isn't grounded in the data in the case, the instructor is trained to crucify her right on the spot. And so we exalt the virtues of data-driven decision making. And then many of the students go to work for consulting firms where they carry data-driven analytical decision making to an nth degree. Thus, in many ways, the whole teaching model condemns managers to act after the game is over. Maybe you can't teach intuition, but maybe you can.

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people's walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo.

If every valuable creative idea is logical in hindsight, then it is only natural to suppose, and to claim, that such ideas could have been reached by logic in the first place and that creativity is unnecessary. That is the main reason why, culturally, we have never paid serious attention to creativity.

Bear in mind that creativity is not coming up with an idea out of nowhere; it's an act of synthesis, of bringing together several things into a novel combination. Creativity is something in service to innovation; it's not innovation itself. And again, it's hard work.

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

It is important to understand that experimentation matters to managing change and uncertainty at four different levels: technical (can it work?), production (can it be produced?), need (does it address customer needs?), and market (is it big enough to justify the investment?).

Alan Kay's famous aphorism is that perspective is worth 80 IQ points. An innovative insight is not the product of an individual's brilliance. It's not as if innovators' heads are wired in different ways. Innovation typically comes from looking at the world through a slightly different lens.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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One important characteristic of the next big thing is that it must have the power to surprise at the time it starts to become big, but surprise only a little bit.It's not whether you can see it coming; it's whether your neighbour doesn't, but only by a little bit. Your neighbour must also share the perception that the next big thing has the power to disrupt the current order. The next big thing is about perception more than reality.

We have the challenge of making things standardized without letting standardization itself become the new straitjacket. First, I believe that it may kill off common sense-for which I have a high regard-because people honestly believe that the system is what you want them to do, rather than what is sensible. And second, I think it's the mavericks and maverick thinkers in all of our organizations who really bring the best innovations and improvements.