Lots of people ask me for advice as if I somehow have found some easy way to create a solution to a problem, and there's no such thing.
— Dean Kamen
We all know about certain problems we wish we didn't have.
Don't be irresponsible in your risks, but as long as the project can fail without it causing the person to fail, keep trying; keep taking the best shots. Learn from them; pick yourself up.
Nobody expects that just because they've made computers better they're going to give them to you free.
I've never had a business plan. Every project we've ever done was the intersection of somebody with a real need, a real passion to do something, and hustling.
When I'm told absolutely no, it's a definite maybe.
We're working on ways to make potable water from polluted water, whether it has organics in it or salt from the ocean, at very low energy input.
Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.
More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.
Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.
A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.
We can't live any more in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed.
If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.
Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.
New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that.
I remember, as a kid, thinking more about, you know, watching the world go by and being amazed by how both complex but consistent and elegant it was. You know, why, you know, when you put that cold glass of water on the table, it kind of warms up at a very predictable way.
I've never regretted anything I've done, even the things that I've failed at. I've often regretted not trying something really big, because you'll never know.
Get used to dealing with failure as long as it doesn't hurt people around you, as long as it doesn't hurt you physically, or it doesn't hurt you so much that you can't pick yourself up.
You can't look at the problem and say, 'I want them to do more, better, faster miracles - and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.' It's unrealistic.
Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.
My plane is a Premiere; it has very efficient gas turbine engines. It goes very fast on relatively little fuel. Flying has been my passion since I was a kid.
I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system.
I would argue that education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.
Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.
The future is going to require really smart people. What we think are crises today probably will be no big deal, and we have no idea what will really be crises in the future.
The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.
I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
If people ridicule you, look them in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I may have failed, but at least I tried,' and get on with it.
Our healthcare system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We're developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people's lives.
My father spent his entire early career as an illustrator for comic books: EC Comics like 'Tales from the Crypt' and 'Creepshow,' then moving on to such magazines as 'Mad' and 'Weird Science.'
Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.
Thinking is my hobby. But sometimes you get to where you're stuck and you can't figure it out, so you just go work on another project. I always have multiple projects.
Clearly, there are many places where diesel is king or gas-turbine is king, or IC engines will win, but there are many places in the world where, as we've seen, they just won't do the job. The modern version of the Stirling engine has some very, very attractive characteristics, and we're trying to optimize it for some of those applications.
Technology is how we create wealth, how we cure diseases, how we'll build an environment that's sustainable and also gives people the capacity to pull more out of this world and still leave it better than when they found it.
Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
An innovation is one of those things that society looks at and says, if we make this part of the way we live and work, it will change the way we live and work.
There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.
If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.
I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.
My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.
Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.
