Innovation Quotes

One area where I think we are especially distinctive is failure. I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.

As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you're going to invent, you're going to disrupt.

Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.

The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer.

Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed in any language, all available in less than sixty seconds.

Long-term thinking levers our existing abilities and lets us do new things we couldn't otherwise contemplate. It supports the failure and iteration required for invention, and it frees us to pioneer in unexplored spaces. Seek instant gratification-or the elusive promise of it-and chances are you'll find a crowd there ahead of you.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss who I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park,listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job."

If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said "Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?" I guarantee you they'd have looked at you strangely and said, "No, thank you."

The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don't know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap intoour own inner imagination about what's possible.

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won't or can't embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you're probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you'll find on surveys. They live with the design.

To get something new done you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It's not optional.

If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.

We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year you're going to double your inventiveness.

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.