The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable assets of a 21st-century institution, whether business or nonbusiness, will be its knowledge, workers, and their productivity.
There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things..... Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.
When I was growing up, my father helped kindle my passion for innovation and technology. He was a high-ranking executive at AT&T and used our family dinner table as a focus group.
I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.
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.
Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
It's better to be in charge of change than to have to react to change.
The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.
If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth - and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.
We always have more ideas than we can fund.
The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption. Companies in fact are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
This is all about having great leaders who can drive agile innovation and agile decision-making.
Innovations are changes which cannot be decomposed into infinitessimal steps.
Managing innovation will increasingly become a challenge to management, and especially to top management, and a touchstone of its competence.
Smart CEOs should be thinking about AI and its impact on their respective business.
...It would be possible to make much more progress than has been made if the NCI knew its job better, knew how to make discoveries...The NCI really does not know how to make discoveries....So long as the NCI is not willing to follow up ideas that seem good to people who have had experience making discoveries, the work of the NCI is going to be pedestrian.
Organize as much as possible around teams, to achieve enhanced focus, task orientation, innovativeness, and individual commitment.
To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.
An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.
When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process. They try to use processes to substitute content.
Ideas, even million-dollar ones, are most vulnerable in their infancy; don't share them with too many people. However, don't hide your plan from people who can help you move it forward.
Whether you lead an early-stage startup or a well-established company, it is critical to challenge yourself and your team to prepare for the next disruptive force - be it a shift in the market, a new consumer trend, or a competing innovation.
So companies have to be very schizophrenic. On one hand, they have to maintain continuity of strategy. But they also have to be good at continuously improving.
Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could - I'm searching for the right word - could, could die.
Innovation is the fuel for growth. When a company runs out of innovation, it runs out of growth.
