Top 25+ Steve Jobs Quotes About Innovation

Steve Jobs Quotes on Innovation | Top 25+ Steve Jobs Quotes About Innovation | Steve Jobs Innovation Quotes | Life lessons & innovation quotes given by Steve Jobs | Inspiration, Motivational and Innovation quotes or words given by Steve Jobs | Motivational and Inspiration Words by Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul Jobs was an American inventor, designer, and entrepreneur who was the co-founder, chief executive, and chairman of Apple Computer. Apple’s revolutionary products, which include the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, are now seen as dictating the evolution of modern technology.

I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. 

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from the process.

The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.

People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.

The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.

Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.

Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.

I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

It’s an hoc meeting of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. 

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Steve Jobs Words on Thinking Differently

The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge. 

Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.

The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think differently, and who move this world forward.

I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight.

On if he is a nerd or a hippie: If I had to pick one of those two I’m clearly a hippie. All the people that I worked with were clearly in that category too.

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Steve Jobs Quotes on Ambition and Changing the World

My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.

Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world. 

We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is going. As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I am really impressed with the quality of our ripple. I know I might be a little hard to get on with, but this is the most fun I’ve had in my life. I’m having a blast.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

None of the really bright people I knew in college went into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and Seventies. All of them are in business now, which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.

I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that at the lowest price we can.

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Steve Jobs Quotes on Quality

We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.

I have to tell you there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it, we just can’t ship junk.

There’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship.

If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation. I’m talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don’t have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings.

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.

We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I’ve seen them again and again throughout my business life.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves.

We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

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