In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.

In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher.

The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.

I don't feel that this concept of disruptive technology is the solution for everybody. But I think it's very important for innovators to understand what we've learned about established companies' motivation to target obvious profitable markets - and about their inability to find emerging ones. The evidence is just overwhelming.

While I wouldn't say that most entrepreneurs find it easy to get funding, there are certainly more people out there funding technology and healthcare companies than in other areas.

People in private equity complain that they have so much capital and so few places to invest. But you have lots of entrepreneurs trying to raise money at the low end and find that they can't get funding because of this mismatch. I think that there is an opportunity there.

The parents of teenagers would love to have a car that won't go very far or go very fast. They could just cruise around the neighborhood, drive it to school, see their friends, plug it in overnight.

If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn't organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job.

We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'

The basic idea that marketing is wrong at its core is one of the main reasons why innovation seems blocked and unpredictable.

The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing much faster than the iPhone. So I worry that modularity will do its work on Apple.

I talk to our kids now that they are grown up, and I ask them about the experiences that had growing up that really had a powerful influence on the way they view the purpose of life. The experiences that really shaped their values - my wife and I have no memory of those experiences!

I got Type 1 diabetes at 30. It hit me in 1982 when I was a White House Fellow in Washington. I had viral pneumonia. I lost 35 pounds in six weeks. And I couldn't see anything. Everything was blurry. I was always thirsty.

Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.

For online universities, like Liverpool and the University of Phoenix, if prices drop by 60%, they still make money. But for the vast majority of traditional universities, if the prices fall by 10%, they are bankrupt; they have no wriggle room.

Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.

The only way all people can have the opportunity to choose or reject the gospel of Jesus Christ is for us, without judgment, to invite them to follow the Savior.

The ability to share the gospel isn't a 'gift' that has been given to only a few Latter-day Saints and denied to the rest.

Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

I haven't met too many people that don't intend to have a fulfilling life. High-achievers, however, end up allocating their resources in a way that seriously undermines their intended strategy.

When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate.

There are a lot of companies - not just Sony and Kodak - that have spent a lot of money trying to make the quality of the digital images comparable with film. But when you're sending these things over the Internet, they don't have to be high quality.

The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital - capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations.