On Not-Invented-Here throughout history.* Ain’ no Innovation found outside our org.

• ”This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
• — Western Union internal memo in response to Bell’s telephone invention

Evolution Enhances Innovation-Matt-Ridley

• “We went to Atari and said, “Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts. What do you think about funding us? Or, we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come to work for you. They said ‘No.’ So, we went to Hewlett Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t gone to college yet.”
• — Steve Jobs
• ”Who the hell wants to hear actors talk!?”
• — H.M Warner of Warner Bros.

“We don’t like their sound. And besides, guitar music is on its way out.”

— Decca Recording company rejecting The Beatles

“What’s all this computer nonsense you’re trying to bring into medicine? I’ve got no confidence at all in computers and I want nothing whatsoever to do with them!”

— Medical Professor in England Dr. John Alfred Powell

“That is good sport. But for the military, the airplane is useless.”

— Ferdinand Foch, Commander in Chief Allied Forces World War I

*Source: BE 2.0. Jim Collins and Bill Lazier pp 219–220.