Five Keys to Innovation

These are just a few things for your journey. But they're important things.

by Rod D. Martin
Inc. Magazine
October 13, 2015

So you want to be an innovator?

Innovation can mean an edge for your business, a breakthrough cure you might need someday, a significant improvement in quality of life: lots of things people need and want. The most significant innovators are frequently treated as heroes. That's nice too.

But where do you begin? Start with these five essentials.

First: Question everything. Never stop improving. 

This is not a call to "dream big dreams" (though that's obviously essential). This is about questioning all of your presuppositions, especially the ones you don't even realize you presuppose.

Nothing is more built into the DNA of most companies than meetings: meetings, meetings preliminary to meetings, meetings about meetings. But at PayPal, meetings were frowned upon: our COO David Sacks (since then the producer of Thank You For Smoking and the founder of Yammer) would actually walk into anything he thought looked like a meeting, listen for a few minutes…