Jonas Ridderstråle

“Gallery visitors did not tell Picasso to invent cubism. Jazz fanatics did not suggest that {{w|Miles Davies}} should work with hip-hoppers. Moviegoers did not propose to Lars von Trier, the Danish film director, that he make Breaking the Waves. And customers sure as hell did not come up with the idea for CDNow or Amazon.com. If you want to do something really interesting and revolutionary, learn to ignore your customers.”

“It is also worth noting that it is extremely difficult to be a great buyer of complementary competencies if you do not have any knowledge about the stuff you are acquiring. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that a man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. We need knowledge to be able to outsource knowledge.”

“While few customer offerings have a life, all great products and services have a soul.”

“Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded.”

“We find support for the contingency logic, suggesting that effective organization design has to take into account the underlying characteristics of the firm's knowledge base.”