What makes a successful enterprise and separates the winners from the losers? Gary Hoover, entrepreneur-in-residence at the McCombs School of Business, pinpoints eight keys to building a successful enterprise that are valid in both good times and bad. Hoover based his keys on his 35+ year career experience, including three Fortune 500 companies and four of his own start-ups (Bookstop and Hoover’s Online were his).

Hoover calls himself a business junkie. He started subscribing to Fortune magazine when he was 12 years old and has a personal business library of more than 40,000 books. Over the next eight weeks, we’ll present each of Hoover's keys for success. We’ll start with curiosity this week - because we know you are curious. Next week, we'll look at the second key - a sense of history.

#1 CURIOSITY People who build great enterprises must have a sense of curiosity. Hoover believes new technologies and better ways of doing things are discovered by looking at things a different way. You can’t continue looking at something that same way everyone else does and come up with something new. All discovery starts with exploration. Travel, observe, talk to people. Look at other industries. Remember the old saying “The early bird to get the worm”? It's not true. Hoover says you don’t have to be first in the market to be successful. What really matters is who does it best, not who does it first. There were at least 30 other online booksellers before Amazon. But Amazon did it best.

For more information on Hoover's Eight Keys to a Successful Enterprise, go to his blog.