Dean Kamen

I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time. ”

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time. ”

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation. ”

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. ”

I've spent quite a bit of time working on wind turbines and exploring control systems and photovoltaic and integration system. ”

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. ”

New ideas in technology are literally a dime-a-dozen, or cheaper than that. ”

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. ”

Most of the time you will fail, but you will also occasionally succeed. Those occasional successes make all the hard work and sacrifice worthwhile. ”

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. ”