Dean Kamen
You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.Collection: Teen
Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.Collection: Age
Nobody expects that just because they've made computers better they're going to give them to you free.Collection: Computers
My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about.Collection: Failure
I think an education is not only important, it is the most important thing you can do with your life.Collection: Education
The city needs a car like a fish needs a bicycle.Collection: Car
Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.Collection: Technology
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.'Collection: Moving
I'd rather lose my own money than someone else's.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Technology
Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.Collection: Technology
If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.Collection: History
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.
Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile.
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.
When I'm told absolutely no, it's a definite maybe.
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.
My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.
Sometimes we crash and burn. It's better to do it in private.
More than ever, the world needs good engineers. However, the pool of talent is shrinking not growing.
If you're going to fail, you might as well fail at the big ones.
I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
I'm a human entropy producer.
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.
I don't want to think about how many people have thought or still think that I'm crazy.
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.
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.
I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.
In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that.
I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.
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.
To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing that has value, real value, has no cost. Not freedom, not food, not shelter, not healthcare.
Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources, they're going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems.
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.
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.
I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system.
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.
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.
Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.
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.
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.
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.
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.