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How to Unleash Creativity in Your Organization

Kimberly Wagner, a partner and a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about creating the best environment to foster creativity.

Wagner notes you can’t demand innovation, “but you sure as heck can take whatever creativity exists in an organization and kill it very quickly.”

She also explains how managing breakthrough innovation in large organizations is very different from two people doing a start-up in a garage. At big companies, “senior managers oftentimes say, ‘We don’t have the creative ideas.’ But if you talk three or four layers into the organization, at the rock face, what you hear is, ‘We have a lot of creative ideas. We just can’t … get permission.'”

The interview is based on Wagner’s research paper, “Managing the Unmanageable — Radical Innovation.”