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

Ultimately, innovation depends on the people with advanced skills who have the ideas, and on the business risk-takers willing to back them.

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 happens because there are people out there doing and trying a lot of different things.

In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

If you tell someone you're doing something innovative, they'll think you're doing something innovative.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.

Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.