Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen have just published the book The Innovator’s DNA.  The book, based on several interviews with entrepreneurs and persons considered innovators in their field, comes out with 5 different skills and behaviors that make these people different from the rest.

The five discovery skills identified are:

• Associating—drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
• Questioning—posing queries that challenge common wisdom. Innovators are consummate questioners who show a passion for inquiry. They frequently challenge the status quo, just as Jobs did when he asked, “Why does a computer need a fan?”. They love to ask, “if we tried this, what would happen?” Innovators, like Jobs, ask questions to understand how things really are today, why they are that way, and how they might be changed or disrupted.
• Observing—scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
• Networking—meeting people with different ideas and perspectives- Rather than simply doing social networking, they actively search for new ideas by talking to people who may offer a radical different view of things.
• Experimenting— Innovators are constantly trying out new experiences and piloting new ideas. They visit new places, try new things, seek new information, and experiment to learn new things.

Why? The authors found two common themes. First, they actively desire to change the status quo. Second, they regularly take smart risks to make change happen.

The learning. Some people are more innovative than others, however, anybody can improve their skills by focusing on the identified behaviors.