Innovation

They are opening seventeen distribution centres. I've never seen a company open more than two or three at a time and this company is opening seventeen! The valuation is very stretched, but the business advantages are, in my opinion, mind-boggling.

Unknown.

If you are a VC or into angel investing, you can come here and literally just set up a stand in a coffee shop with a sign saying 'looking for start-ups' and you would have a string of people coming in all day long... you could literally sit in that coffee shop from now until next year and you wouldn't get close to touching the sides.

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

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.' Intel also have a number of substantial R&D facilities here... All the chips also have Hebrew biblical names which are the original names of the chips as they are developed in laboratories here in Israel.

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

Architecture should fulfil multiple criteria. One of its purposes is to itself. A lot of people believe to some degree, in the autonomy of architecture as a discipline which means that part of the purpose of architecture is to construct new forms of knowledge that relate to the enhancement and advancement of the discipline.

Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design & Architecture Theorist

From fighter-pilot, to test-pilot to astronaut was a logical sequence for a guy that loves aviation. I was very fortunate.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

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, and create a much more reliable system for all.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

We have open and transparent pricing through our futures exchange- that means price is determined by buyers and sellers and not an 'official' selling price set by a producer. In that regard, it's unique and filling a need that is not currently serviced East of Suez.

In a bit of a unique proposition, this exchange was created before the ecosystem existed. When you look at the growth and development of WTI, you have Houston which has production, New York which provides financing, the refineries on the Gulf Coast, the traders, marketers, banks and many other pieces of the puzzle which are already there. The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.

This is certainly something that is not without risk. We are pursuing an audacious goal, and we very well might fail. When NASA set the Moon landing challenge, it created a whole series of capabilities and technologies that we previously could not have imagined.

150 years ago, Aluminium was the rarest metal we knew of on the surface of planet Earth. Through technology we learned how to extract it from the bauxite in the Earth's crust, and discovered it was the most abundant metal. We went from Napoleon serving Kings and Queens on the finest Aluminium plate-ware to much more money made on Aluminium within 20 years.

It's multi-fold. Firstly resources that are useful on Earth that we may get from outer space and secondly- which is perhaps a newer idea- is resources that will be useful in space itself. Water is the essence of life. In space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.

All of the research we've done exploring space has now allowed small teams- with modest funds- to do what it once took entire governments to do. The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too.

The block chain or general ledger could be a secure repository of private information, property ownership, and conditional contracts. For example, consider buying a car. The dealership sells it to you and it goes into the block chain. You have a private code that identifies you as the owner.

Duke University finance professor; pioneering research on market anomalies and asset pricing

You only get to really redesign markets root and branch when they are failing so dramatically that everyone acknowledges it. Markets are a little like language. It's hard to change the spelling of certain words in the English language, even though those spellings are dysfunctional. Markets that are getting-along but not doing as well as they could are very hard to change.

Nobel Prize-winning economist specializing in market design theory

Size continues to be important, but is no longer the main factor shielding the powerful from the challenges of newcomers and new arrivals.

Venezuelan editor, author, and international affairs analyst and commentator

Steve Jobs forced me to figure out what was important to me, and who I was. He demanded that everybody in the room had to be at the top of their game, the best in their field… He was challenging people every day to do their best work and rise above their own talents. He hired the most brilliant people and pushed them to go further.