Good innovators like to solve business crossword puzzles.

In the early stages of innovation, your goal is to learn as much as you can as quickly as you can.

The curious company studies the anomalies or the unexpected findings. The company that isn't curious ignores them or punishes people who don't do exactly what they set out to do.

We've got some great big problems in our world. We have to figure out how to feed 10 billion people. Too many people can't access clean water, quality healthcare, and reasonable education. We have to figure out what to do about climate change, income inequality, and more. Innovators need to rise to the challenge!

A spreadsheet for an innovative idea reports the mathematical relationship between made up numbers. You can't cash a spreadsheet.

Every leader needs to watch what teenagers or startup companies - or startup companies headed by teenagers - are doing today, because many of those behaviors will be mainstream behaviors tomorrow.

It's one of the underappreciated skills required by an innovator - they have to be able to convince lots of people to do things that might not be fully rational (invest in the company, join something that is likely to fail, try a product they've never seen before), and if you can't tell a good story it is just very hard to make that happen.