Radical Innovation, Part I: Unleashing Creativity

You can't legislate innovation. But companies can either actively encourage it or “take whatever creativity exists in an organization and kill it very quickly,” says Kimberly A. Wagner.

October 23, 2014 • 1 min read

You can’t legislate creativity or innovation. “But you sure as heck can take whatever creativity exists in an organization and kill it very quickly,” says Kimberly A. Wagner, a partner and a managing director at the Boston Consulting Group. In this Knowledge at Wharton video, Wagner 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.'”