Jonathan Schwartz lists five principles that drive innovation

Jonathan Schwarz is the chief executive officer and president of Sun Microsystems.  He writes a weblog that is worth reading: Jonathan's Blog, and in fact, he contributes to his blog much more frequently than other CEOs. 

On September 12, he wrote a comment in the Financial Times entitled "The five founding principles that drive innovation".  Here is a brief summary.  Needless to say, the article is worth reading.

1. Hire the best and let them lead you. Build and encourage a culture of leadership regardless of title or department and ensure there is communication and interaction between leaders of different departments and product groups.
2. Share. Create communities with partners, customers and business groups that allow collaboration and open innovation. After all, this is the “participation age”.
3. Create small groups and give them autonomy. Steering committees do not work. Create task forces with the ability to identify and create projects that matter. Bring in different voices in the brainstorming phase.
4. Allow public debate. Transparency of ideas and debate is always healthy but you have to know when the debate should end. Then move quickly to focus resources towards achieving the goals.
5. Have the courage to make hard decisions. At Sun, this was to invest when others were cutting and to drive increased focus in our engineering operations.