“After studying more than thirty successful attackers, I believe that the simple answer is that they broke the rules of the game in their industry. The common element in all the successful attacks is strategic innovation.”

“It is not that managers in big companies can’t see the disruptive changes coming. Usually they can. Nor do they lack the resources to confront them. Most big companies have talented managers and specialists, strong product portfolios, first-rate technological know-how, and deep pockets…

“Innovations, whether of product, process, or market, always move through two quite different stages. First, someone has to come up with the new idea. Then someone (often someone other than the idea imaginator) has to refine, focus, and implement that idea.”

“Management research confirms that innovative firms – those that are able to use innovation to improve their processes or to differentiate their products and services – outperform their competitors, measured in terms of market share, profitability, growth or market capitalization. However, the management of innovation is inherently difficult and risky: most new technologies fail to [...]

It’s fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn’t make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, “Oh yeah, this stuff is good.”

“We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.”