quotes

'Flushed with excitement, Bell and Watson demonstrated their new device to Western Union, but the company's executives failed to see its potential. "Mr Bell," they wrote to him, "after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities," adding that they saw no future for "an electrical toy". Fortunately for Bell, others were not so short-sighted. Within just four years of its invention, America had 60,000 telephones.'
Bill Bryson, Made in America, Secker and Warburg, 1994

'So we went to Atari and said, "Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you." And they said, "No." So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, "Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet."
Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple Computer, inc

'I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year.'
Business books editor, Prentice Hall, 1957

'Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.'
Thomas Edison (1847-1931), US inventor

'The thing about inventing is that it is a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions. In fact, that is where most inventions come from. They very rarely come out of nothing.'
James Dyson, Against the Odds, 1997

'We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.'
Charles Kettering (1876-1958), US engineer who invented self-starting auto ignition

'No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine.'
Jerry Hirshberg, The Creative Priority, Penguin, 1998

'If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said "you can't do this".'
Spence Silver on developing the adhesive for 3M Post-It notes