Making Organizations "Creative Hothouses".

• Position: Brief Article

Organizations are able to encourage their employees' creativity by emulating the "creative hothouses" that produced geniuses like playwright William Shakespeare and inventor/artist Leonardo da Vinci, suggests Barton Kunstler, professor of management, Lesley University, Cambridge, Mass. "While creativity is popularly viewed as the fruit of one person's inspiration, it does not happen in a social vacuum," he told the World Future Society, Bethesda, Md.

Successful hothouse communities--like ancient Athens and Elizabethan England--thrived because they established highly efficient systems for exchanging ideas and encouraging learning. Innovative ideas and systems require an environment that flourishes on experimentation. If the artists and mathematicians of Florence could do it, so can today's corporations.

Kunstler identifies a number of traits common to hothouse environments, including:

* A cosmic sense of mission and belief in the absolute meaningfulness of the work

* A strong sense of social utility, of being vital to people's...