Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.

The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data;

We're taught by repetition but great innovators need to be great at doing the different.

How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold — it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction — that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention).

Innovation involves bringing together ideas, research, development, financing, and commercialization.

The first step in innovation is to know that a thing can be created. After that, the rest is a matter of detail.

Innovation is a process of rebellion essentially. Unless you rebel, unless you challenge the status quo, how can you innovate anything

Innovation has become a buzzword that entrepreneurs and policy makers are fond of using. It is not enough to create something new as a business person, it needs to be valuable to your market. Therefore, at least for entrepreneurs, innovation should be focused and targeted

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.

Capitalism puts higher and higher demands on people to be able to improvise, to adapt to the constant changes of the market, to interact with each other and communicate in an effective way, to be ready at any time for the worse. There is a strong correlation between the importance of constant innovation in capitalism and in improvisation, and we cannot avoid that there is a strong relationship between the two. … The more open you are to experimentation, the more you would be likely to open up new avenues for capitalism to produce value.

Innovation happens when people are given the freedom to ask questions and the resources and power to find the answers.