We create and consume research every day. Governments make policies, organizations develop products, and people change their lives based on[bad] research. Academics spend their careers filling shelves (or the cloud) with research that will never get read and quite frankly, never should. Do you want to create good research? Do you want to create research that will have an impact? If you can’t answer “yes” to these five questions your research will be rubbish. 1. Is your research interesting? Research is ‘good’ not because it is true (Big ‘T’ truth or little ‘t’ truths) but because it is interesting. Interesting research challenges rather than reinforces accepted ideas and ways of thinking. Instead of stating what is known or obvious, explore the unknown and unapparent. In other words, research will “only be noticed when it denies an old truth” –Murray Davis in That’s Interesting. To conduct interesting research, you need to be willing to throw convention out the door. To critique rather than believe every text you read. And to charter new territory. Look for correlations among things that have previously been deemed unrelated. Hypothesize order among things that seemed to be disorganized. Make it interesting. 2. Is your research innovative? Robert Sutton, in his book Weird Ideas That Work said that innovations aren’t “conjured out of thin air” but result from using “old ideas in new ways, combinations, or places.” In his book he points out that Viagra (an erectile dysfunction pill) was originally designed to treat hypertension. Had the company’s researchers not been attentive to the drug’s side effects, a billion dollar industry wouldn’t exist today. How does this relate to your research? Here’s another example. I study leisure. If you asked one of my colleagues to name a ‘leisure’ theory, they would be hard pressed to do it. Most of our theories are borrowed from other disciplines. We’ve applied existing theories to a new context, leisure, and it has worked incredibly well. Innovation isn’t so much about originality as it is about creativity. Creative combinations and applications can elevate your research from the mundane to the interesting.