“What motivates great entrepreneurs is fear of failure; and here's the thing – most entrepreneurs fail several times before they achieve success, and the more you fail, the more fear you have.”
— Kevin O’Leary
Shark Tank investor, businessman, and former Canadian political candidate

The quote archive

Innovation

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

Even something as simple as bubble sort does things that are not in the code. This is not philosophy; it's actual data. There is another source that competencies come from.

— Michael Levin

It was possible to get up to 0.4 milligrammes per day, and all of a sudden there was a 14 to 15 per cent weight loss. That changed the whole picture.

— Jens Juul Holst

Nobody in the beginning believed that it was possible to create an obesity treatment with this kind of drug. Everybody would say, “oh, it’s their own fault.”

— Jens Juul Holst

All of this was unexpected. The entire development was unexpected. Nobody could really believe that this would happen.

— Jens Juul Holst

The problem of our information society isn’t anymore that we don’t have access to information. It’s that we have actually too much information.

— Richard Socher

It was one of those typical examples of people combining different ideas from different fields and finding magic at that intersection.

— Richard Socher

Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA. There are only a handful of countries who spend relatively more on R&D than the USA.

— Marc Chandler

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

We are scientifically naked in front of this threat. We do not have the diagnostics to quickly detect an MDR or XDR case. Once detected, we do not have the drugs to effectively treat the patient at reasonable cost, and we do not have a TB vaccine.

— Sir Richard Feachem

Unknown.

It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world...it's going to be a game changer.

— Steve Jobs

Co-Founder of Apple & Pioneer of Personal Computing

Technology is no longer a separate segment- it is pervasive. It is technology IN agriculture, IN governance, IN education, IN health. It is also about health technologies, education technologies and agricultural technologies- there are two sides to it.

— Dr. Sam Pitroda

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Innovation is not about products or scientific laboratories- it is also about governance, education and everything we do as people. It is not about scientists alone innovating.

— Dr. Sam Pitroda

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Almost all of the processes we use today were designed in the twentieth century, with the old mindset of command and control. Forms and data such as immigration, customs, starting a company, land records, birth certificates, death certificates, police reports, court cases- all these processes, designed in the twentieth century, are now obsolete. You have to redesign your processes to meet the needs of the twenty first century, and the web.

— Dr. Sam Pitroda

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

When I entered the telecom scene in India, in the early nineteen eighties, we had two million telephones for seven hundred and fifty million people. It used to take fifteen years to get a telephone connection. In a very short space of time, just twenty five years, we have seven hundred and fifty million telephones. We are adding ten million every month, month after month, and for the first time in the history of India- we are a connected nation of over a billion people.

— Dr. Sam Pitroda

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Every plant has to endlessly sense and monitor a number of environmental parameters; and is constantly called upon to make decisions. This is not the place to list numerous cases of intelligence behaviour in plants, a huge volume of such examples can be found in scientific literature.

— Stefano Mancuso

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

A nervous system is just a group of cells specialised in transmitting impulses from one to another. Ordinary plant cells can do this, albeit in a less efficient way. It is indisputable that there is no need of this "Holy Grail" of a nervous system to have the miracle of the transmission of electrical signals and communication.

— Stefano Mancuso

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

We manage risk by lending into the value-chain where we are able to leverage the non-financial-assets of the corporation that's buying from these communities and agricultural businesses. By having off-take agreements, we have guaranteed demand for the underlying product and, therefore, bankable cash-flows.

— William Foote

Unknown.