From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You have to re-earn your customer's business every single day – it's not just about listening to them, but anticipating what they don't realise they need, and staying ahead of them.
It is the difference between an investor asking, 'so, what's your product…' and 'so, what's your idea, and what steps can we take to turn that into a product.'
By 1970, with a budding awareness of computers, I envisioned a future where the cumbersome administrative tasks of gaming could be offloaded to computers, transforming gameplay into something as visually captivating as television but with the added allure of interactivity. My vision was clear: to merge the engagement of gaming with the visual appeal of TV, thereby revolutionising how we play.
The sustainability of traditions relies on their ability to evolve. This was the crux of my message: how can we help this tradition evolve? Because at that time, it was certainly losing its vitality.
You cannot get a breakthrough, you cannot get a change nor a transformation unless you are willing to take that risk by stepping into the unknown. If getting the possibility requires going through uncertainty, they are two sides of the same coin.
What was impossible 20 years ago, is possible today. What is impossible today, will be possible x-years from now. We are always in change.
One of the unique aspects of a prize, and particularly an X-Prize, is that it doesn't require letters after your name, specific degrees or backgrounds or so on. We simply define what it is we want solved, and award the prize to whomever is able to accomplish that.
Suddenly, your intuition about what to build is much more likely to be right because you're building what's missing in the future. You're tinkering with technologies first hand, understanding what's new about them firsthand, and understanding what's missing to fulfill and actualize their full potential firsthand.
My initial motivation for studying quantum computing was a desire to understand the fundamental computational limits of the universe. Even in the absence of practical applications, I believed this pursuit was worthwhile as the most rigorous test of quantum mechanics to date. In fact, I often joke that disproving quantum computing sceptics is the primary application of a quantum computer, with everything else being a bonus.
There will be no cure for cancer until real doctors with real patients in real hospitals can attempt an innovation.
Water is the essence of life. On Earth it's used to grow plants and within industrial processes but in space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. One cubic metre of water gives the same protection as Earth's atmosphere and magnetosphere. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.
Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business… for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.