This document provides 12 quotes about small business innovation from various experts. The quotes emphasize that innovation requires thinking differently and taking risks, as new ideas are often misunderstood at first. They also stress the importance of learning, encouraging creativity in employees, and being willing to make mistakes in order to drive innovation.

1. SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION
12 Idea-Inspiring Quotes

2. “Innovation is hard. It really is, because most people
don’t get it… the automobile, the airplane, the telephone,
these were all considered toys at their introduction
because they had no constituency. They were too new.
Most of us understand that innovation is enormously
important. It’s the only insurance against irrelevance. It’s
the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty. It’s the
only strategy for out-performing a dismal economy.”
Gary Hamel, founder, Strategos
#dontwait

3. “Mindless habitual behavior
is the enemy of innovation.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School
#dontwait

4. “Learning and innovation go hand in
hand. The arrogance of success is to
think that what you did yesterday will
be sufficient for tomorrow.”
William Pollard, physicist
#dontwait

5. “One big part of innovation is being willing to
step outside of your comfort zone and take a
risk. Every new idea is not successful right out
of the gate, but if you’re not willing to take a
chance, you’ll never know if your idea has
staying power.”
Alyssa Gregory, founder, Small Business Bonfire
#dontwait

6. “The roots of great innovation are never just in
the technology itself. They are always in the
wider historical context. They require new
ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The
significant problems we face cannot be solved
at the same level of thinking we were at when
we created them.”
David Brooks, New York Times Columnist
#dontwait

7. “Innovation is the specific instrument
of entrepreneurship - the act that
endows resources with a new capacity
to create wealth.”
Peter Drucker, management expert
#dontwait

8. “We used to write this down by saying, ‘move fast
and break things.’ And the idea was, unless you
are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast
enough. I think there’s probably something in that
for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that
making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the
goal of building something is to build something,
not to not make mistakes.”
Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook
#dontwait

9. “After years of telling corporate citizens to
‘trust the system,’ many companies must
relearn instead to trust their people – and
encourage their people to use neglected
creative capacities in order to tap the most
potent economic stimulus of all: idea power.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School
#dontwait

10. “There’s always an element of chance
and you must be willing to live with
that element. If you insist on certainty,
you will paralyze yourself.”
J.P. Getty, Getty Oil Company
#dontwait

11. “It’s the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic
which causes the wooliness and confusion around
the term ‘innovation’. Everybody wants to be
innovative; many companies and ideas are
proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that
innovation is a money spinner.
And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula.
Well, here you go:
Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.”
James Dyson, founder, Dyson
#dontwait

12. “Never tell people how to do things.
Tell them what to do and they will
surprise you with their ingenuity.”
General George Patton
#dontwait

13. “If you have always done it that way, it
is probably wrong.”
Charles Kettering, founder, Delco
#dontwait

14. Looking for ways to be innovative with
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Charles Kettering, founder, Delco