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Most companies don't have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.

Successful companies obviously have people with ideas and energy.

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.

Innovation is this amazing intersection between someone's imagination and the reality in which they live. The problem is, many companies don't have great imagination, but their view of reality tells them that it's impossible to do what they imagine.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

You can always think that we're old and not innovative, but there is no company that can limp on for 139 years without being creative and having the genes to change.

You know, a lot of people are just interested in, in building a company so they can make money and get out.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.