Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

May 19, 2008

Business leaders must manage and support creativity just as they would any other asset. Harvard Business School professors Teresa Amabile, Mary Tripsas, and Mukti Khaire discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin.

Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.—Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Inauguration Day, 1933

Creativity, a quality more traditionally associated with artistic endeavors, has been slow to find its acknowledged place in the business world. Yet any entrepreneur can attest to the creative power required to build an organization where none existed before. "Look, I made a hat…/Where there never was a hat," sings Georges Seurat in the musical Sunday in the Park with George, a fictionalized account of the French pointillist painter, and it's easy to imagine Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey humming the same tune.

Julia Hanna

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