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How Do You Boost an Organization's Creative Potential?

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Submitted By lil2los10
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How Do You Boost an Organization's Creative Potential?
The editors of Harvard Business Review asked some of today's most innovative leaders.
It's one of the toughest challenges an executive faces: How do you get your people to think creatively--to challenge the status quo--while still keeping your everyday operations running smoothly? Innovation is not like most other business functions and activities. There are no reliable templates, rules, processes, or even measures of success. In a sense, each act of innovation is a unique feat, a leap of the individual--or the collective--imagination that can be neither predicted nor replicated. Innovation, in short, is anything but business as usual
And yet certain organizations are somehow able to come up with great ideas over and over again. Some of the ideas are for new products, some for new ways of working; others are for new strategies, still others for entirely new lines of business. Is there a secret to these companies' successes? Can other organizations learn from their examples? To find out, we turned to the people most qualified to answer--not necessarily inventors (although you'll find a few of them in the group) but those who've been able to inspire others to creative genius. We asked them a single question: "What's the one thing you've done that most inspired innovation in your organization?" Here's what they had to say.
Make It the Norm.
Craig Wynett is the general manager of future growth initiatives at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati.
What we've done to encourage innovation is make it ordinary. By that I mean we don't separate it from the rest of our business. Many companies make innovation front-page news, and all that special attention has a paradoxical effect. By serving it up as something exotic, you isolate it from what's normal. Companies don't trumpet their quality assurance processes or their

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