A stratospheric success at Google might never have reached escape velocity if folks weren’t allowed to indulge pet projects. Here’s the inside scoop.

Jon Beekman, Founder and CEO of ManCrates, shares an enlightened tactic for helping innovators find breakthroughs they aren’t even looking for.

A recurring theme on the road to creative mastery is how we (wrongly) perceive those who are successful as having never struggled. The truth is, many endured rejection.

How did Harvard’s B.F. Skinner became one of the most influential psychologists of all time? An eccentric nightly habit may shed fresh light on the answer.

What can leaders do to promote creativity and innovation in their organizations? According to bestselling author and innovation guru Tom Kelley, when they’re shown new ideas, they should squint.

If innovation is a numbers game, subject to considerable odds, then how can a leader bend the odds? IDEO’s Brendan Boyle says play is a key lever to drive the breadth of experimentation required to succeed.

Stanford Professor Clifford Nass studied hundreds of students to explore what distinguished self-proclaimed “multitaskers” from the rest of us. His conclusions, and their implications, won’t surprise you.

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Charles Duhigg explains how we can turbo-charge sense-making, and turn information into valuable knowledge.

“I don’t know,” might be three of the hardest words to say, especially for a professor. A leader is often conceived as the one who knows. And yet, not knowing creates space for the unexpected to emerge…

The best creators are constantly learning. There’s immense value in doing something you’re not good at, specifically for the sake of seeing an old thing from a fresh angle.

Great leaders know that every innovation begins with a problem. Instead of telling their people to “bring me solutions,” they encourage folks to be on the lookout for problems worth solving.

It’s a grave mistake to assume that a spectacular outcome started out spectacularly. As Ed Catmull, Founder and CEO of Pixar says, “Our job is to take movies from suck to not suck.”

Paraphrasing Google X CEO Astro Teller, sparking group innovation can be as simple asking a team to “Gimme five.” Those two words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

The most popular post in my Stanford Slack channel illustrates a profound source of creative wisdom: “Would anyone be interested in staying after class tomorrow to brainstorm experiments?”

We crave innovation that’s buttoned up nice and neat. But the creative process rarely is. It is “non-linear.” But we often eliminate the variability which drives unexpected outcomes.

There’s a critical flaw with our default approach problem solving: we tend to look for things to add, even when subtraction yields better solutions.

What do you do when your work is under public attack? Few have grappled with the question as deeply as Becky Margiotta, co-founder and champion of the 100,000 Homes campaign.

This guest post comes from Ozan Varol, one of my favorite rocket scientists. It’s excerpted from his new book, “Awaken Your Genius,” which is sure to be on my year-end best books list!

Don’t just generate new ideas. Iterate your old ones, too. According to legendary creators James Clear and Mr. Beast, iteration is sometimes even more important than a new idea.

One of the great secrets to effective creativity is, when you're finding creative output hard to come by, shift your attention to your inputs. The outputs of our thinking are largely a function of the inputs we seek.