Innovation Quotes

Our garage was basically science fair central.

Great innovations, large and small, are happening every day at Amazon because of our obsession with customers.

That kind of divine discontent comes from observing customers and noticing that things can always be better.

You gotta earn your keep in this world. When you invent something new, if customers come to the party, it's disruptive to the old way.

I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.

If you're watching your competitors, you're unlikely to invent a bunch of stuff on your own.

No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn't help.

We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees.

One of the things we don't do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it's very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it...the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What's the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don't want to just do things because we can do them...we don't want to be redundant.

One advantage - perhaps a somewhat subtle one - of a customer-driven focus is that it aids a certain type of proactivity. When we're at our best, we don't wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to.

I now wear a Jawbone. This is a bracelet that keeps track of how I sleep, move and eat - transmitting that information to the cloud. It allows me to track and maintain my health much better.

Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive, and determination of the people behind it as the product they sell.

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?

Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Tesla is here to stay and keep fighting for the electric car revolution.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

If we drive down the cost of transportation in space, we can do great things.

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.