Innovation Quotes

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.

Businesses that grow by development and improvement do not die. But when a business ceases to be creative, when it believes it has reached perfection and needs to do nothing but produce no improvement, no development, it is done.

It is a striving to attain the best. To throttle it would mean to stop all progress. Certain men do not need to compete. They are pioneers.

I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

I see no advantage in these new clocks. They run no faster than the ones made 100 years ago.

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

If you don't give people a chance to fail... you won't innovate... if you wanna be an innovative company allow people to make mistakes.

I think innovation as a discipline needs to go back and get rethought and revived. There are so many models to talk about innovation, there are so many typologies of innovation, and you have to find a good innovation metric that truly captures the innovation performance of a company.

Most companies target women as end users, but few are effectively utilizing female employees when it comes to innovating for female consumers. When women are empowered in the design and innovation process, the likelihood of success in the marketplace improves by 144%!

It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job. Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it.

I really love retail history. We started our first Supercenter in 1988, prior to that we were operating general merchandise discount stores, and we tried some big hypermarkets copied from Europe and they had failed miserably, but we tried to downsize it and make it a Supercenter and it started working.

I think we've seen it all. The e-commerce store is the interesting one.

There were several people that realized the customer is telling us something and the idea of a broad assortment delivered to your home is appealing.

Everybody loves convenience, everyone wants to save time. But we had built a business called the Supercenter business that was one stop shopping that helped people save time and you had instant gratification because you could walk in the Supercenter and you could get 120,000 SKUs, and they were the best items from around the world.

If you think that a store e-commerce business is the answer, you end up thinking that a population of less than a million items is enough, and you end up thinking that you don't need an e-commerce marketplace, and you end up thinking other things.

People were wondering, "How do you even do food e-commerce? Are we going to be dropping strawberries on somebody's doorstep? It doesn't feel like we're going to be doing that". But what we believed is that in the US pickup might work. So we started in California and then Denver, and a team started working to put everything in place to do grocery pickup and in the beginning we even had a separate app. It was an orange online grocery app.

It was always the plan to bring things together, but just like the structure, it needed to be separate for a while for good reasons. We couldn't pick at store level the full Supercenter for a while. It's a lot harder to receive an e-commerce order and pick a toy at Christmas on time than it is to pick the strawberries every day, because you know where they are.

We love basket businesses, the Supercenter is a basket business, Sam's Club is a big basket business. We want to build an e-commerce business that's a basket business, not just a spear fishing exercise.

One of the technology leaders, a few years ago, was visiting with me here and we were writing on the whiteboard and they stopped and turned around and looked at me and said, "Oh my God, you're going to win." And I said, "Yeah, but why?". "Now, tell me how".