Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

This line is one of the most widely circulated sayings attributed to Steve Jobs, and the attribution itself is not in doubt: no competing author exists, and the sentiment is squarely consistent with how Jobs spoke about innovation and leadership throughout his career. It is most often traced to his April 1989 Inc. Magazine interview, published when the magazine named him "Entrepreneur of the Decade" — a wide-ranging conversation in which he argued that great products come from anticipating what customers cannot yet articulate rather than following them. However, when we examined the full reprinted transcript of that interview, along with posthumously collected volumes of his speeches and correspondence (including the Steve Jobs Archive's 'Make Something Wonderful' and Mark Milian's 'Letters to Steve'), we could not locate the exact one-sentence wording in a primary source; the surfaces that quote it verbatim are secondary and derivative. We therefore treat it as authentically Jobs in spirit and near-universally credited to him, but not yet confirmed word-for-word against an original — hence attributed rather than verified.