Beijing Debate Quotes

Robert Friedman

"Innovation has become somewhat of a buzzword in the business community. What does it mean? It means change, it means invention, it means doing things differently to stay ahead of your competition."

Eric Kim

"I think it's a common accepted wisdom today that in order for businesses to succeed you have to innovate."

"Nowadays trying to differentiate purely on technology and product attributes is becoming more and more difficult because technology is changing so rapidly. The ability to differentiate based on perception is becoming a key element to achieve market differentiation and market success."

"Perception is reality and reality drives perception and so when one focuses on innovation you also have to really focus on understanding your target and being able to position your innovation in a way that gets acceptance."

"Customers are very smart - I would never take customer loyalty for granted. No matter how big you are, no matter how powerful you are, you can't say well my customer is loyal and therefore I can take it easy."

Marjorie Yang

"Today we have the 'e' culture - ethics, environment, exploration, excellence and education. And all five of them are interrelated."

"Within our company we have tried to build a culture of perpetually learning from our mistakes. Within the communities we have tried to help those who are not as fortunate as we are. It has given our people a sense of pride and that sense of pride is very important in the other activities that we are engaging in the company."

"There are a lot of old habits that we've adopted and we have to get people to think out of that box, be prepared to abandon the old way of doing things and get into an uncomfortable zone."

"It's useful to have a woman as a CEO because they think I'm mad and therefore quite willing to humour me and try new things."

Ken Robinson

"One of the things that strikes me as I travel about is that very many adults think they are not very creative. And this seems to matter rather a lot because innovation is absolutely critical to the future of business"

"We're all of us now facing a revolution. It's an economic revolution and a social revolution and its comparable to anything we've seen in history and perhaps exceeds it in some key respects."

"In order to meet this revolution I think we have to completely rethink our attitude to human resources and particularly to our conceptions of intelligence. And in particular I feel our education systems have to be completely transformed if we are to face the challenges of the future."

"W need to think differently about how we educate people, we need to think differently about how we organise our companies and organisations."

"Education is the biggest investment we can make in our own future."

"The problem as I see it as I go around is that most countries are making a mistake. The mistake is that they tend to believe that we can face the future simply by doing better what we did in the past, we just have to do more of it."

"The problem now is that graduates are not terribly good at things you need them to be good at. They can't think in a creative way, they are not very good at communicating, they are not very good at working in teams."

"Children are born with immense creative capacities, but they lose them by the time they are educated."

"We are born with immense creative capacities, but we systematically root them out of ourselves in the process of educating people and now business and national systems are desperate to re-in store creativity in all of our people."

"On the whole we are educating people as if we are still facing the industrial revolution - which by the way required a largely manual work force and a minority of people doing intellectual work which is way we had the system structured the way it was."

"The one thing that stands in the way of our long-term prosperity is a failure of our collective imagination and it seems to me that in bringing together the economic with the cultural with the ethical and the educational is our only way into the future."

"One of the problems for education is that it is based on a linear model and I think we should be investing much more not in conformity, which is what we tend to do in schools, but alongside it on divergence and creativity. We should be putting more value on people thinking differently, particularly on entrepreneurship, on people taking responsibility for their own lives and careers and on encouraging local enterprise."

"Children are more than academics. Academics are important but it's a very narrow view of intelligence and often the most successful people you meet often didn't do very well at school I find. Some of the most creative people I know failed at school."