Jay S. Walker

For most of human history, there was a ruling class and then there was everybody else. If you were part of everybody else, it wasn't your job to imagine a different future, different ways of doing things. So, imagination is a fairly modern phenomenon.

Most organizations do not value imagination, do not encourage it, do not reward it. In many cases, they don't even think about it. But if you're not thinking about imagination, I guarantee you're not going to have meaningful innovation.

If you're a doctor, what do you promise to do? First, do no harm. If your operating philosophy is do no harm, that's not a call to imagination. Not only that, if I'm a patient, I don't want your imagination. I want what works.

The issue is not to ask your customers what they want today, but to try to imagine what the customer is going to want in a world where, for instance, their cellphone is in their glasses.

I've always been an entrepreneur. I start businesses for a living.

I get my competitiveness from my mom.

Computing is becoming universal.

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.