Even when companies try to encourage bottom-up innovation, ideas from employees rarely see the light of day. Researchers have found that managers can be a significant barrier to implementing novel ideas from employees when they feel insecure about their status within the organization. Once they recognize this, organizations can take steps to incentivize managers to better promote ideas from employees to the benefit of the managers, their subordinates, and the company itself.

Despite widespread agreement on the importance of creativity, leaders often fail to recognize creative ideas-or worse, reject them outright. The authors summarize research pointing to a variety of conditions that bias managers toward judging creative ideas negatively. Heeding the call for tools that aid in the recognition of creativity, they then describe their model for successfully pitching ideas in organizations, which, assuming true idea novelty, features two critical proactive behaviours on the part of the employee: idea enactment and influence tactics.