“The crucial bit came when I was 20 and we got dropped from our record deal, leaving us high and dry. That was when I thought, 'am I going to be someone who only wants to do music when it's all going well? And only when it's served to me on a plate? Or do I want to do this… no matter what…' For me, there was nothing else, I wanted to make music.”
— Sophie Ellis-Bextor
British Pop Singer & "Murder on the Dancefloor" Artist

The quote archive

Innovation

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

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.

— Dr. Sam Pitroda

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

These markets will become a crucible for innovation and dynamic change. This will give more growth to derivative markets as we move forward.

— Craig Donohue

Former CEO of CME Group, global derivatives exchange leader.

We define the credit risk of a bond portfolio as the volatility of the CDS basket which would perfectly hedge the sovereign risk of the portfolio.

— Bruder, Hereil & Roncalli

Much jitteriness in this recent crisis has come down to 'flying blind' – where investors and risk managers have been caught somewhat unaware, and do not have the visibility to make decisions with support.

— Author

You cannot govern a 21st century globalised business with the management style of an 18th century trading firm. In the same way, the modes (and rationale) of governance must be brought up-to-speed with the nature of the citizens they are responsible for.

— Not specified

In all the politics that's going on… everyone says that small business are the driver for growth. The truth is, it's not just small businesses… it's NEW businesses. They are the ones that consume the largest number of jobs in an economy and lead to economic growth.

— David S. Friedman

Instead of looking at hoarded cash as being a 'rainy day fund' we need to view these balances as stores of economic growth. This cash represents potential investments, new jobs, new innovations and the potential for significant wealth creation and diffusion.

— Author

Bill Gates of Microsoft is on-record as saying, 'Microsoft would not function as a company in the way that it does without operations in Israel.'

— Michael Freedman

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Israel is not called 'the start-up nation' for nothing. We have great statistics to show the number of start-ups per capita, the number of PhD's per capita, V/C Dollars per capita, Patents per capita and more. Israel creates a huge amount of innovative start-ups which are often bought out before they are even revenue producing!

— Michael Freedman

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

In the same way that business entrepreneurship has transformed industry since the early 1970's, social entrepreneurship can transform the social sector by having people who are willing to take risks and innovate to help address social issues.

— Nick O’Donohoe

The old adage 'hedge funds are bought, not sold', will likely need to be revisited. Likewise, firms will be forced to adapt and evolve their infrastructures to process and pursue inbound inquiries from prospective investors.

— Jeff Joseph

Once you're able to reduce the human element, and automate the reporting of these statistics- you will be greatly reducing the potential for misbehaviour. This is where regulators can leverage technology, reduce their burden.

— Andrew Lo

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.

— Christopher Fix

One of the unique aspects of a prize is that when you put a dollar up in a prize purse, you're incentivising teams around the world to spend many times that dollar in pursuit of the competition. You are leveraging dollars in a completely different way- in a philanthropic pursuit.

— Eileen Bartholemew

We've found that innovation really happens when you constrain a problem very specifically and then throw it out to the world to solve. It's a slightly different way of thinking.

— Eileen Bartholemew