Businesses thrive on new ideas, and having a work force that can develop them can be a significant driver of success.

Productivity is relatively easy to increase – you can add on to your facility, you can put more equipment on your line or you can simply tell Chet on third shift to stop texting his cousin and get back to work. Creativity, on the other hand, is arguably just as important for the survival of a business, but getting more of it from your employees is nowhere nearly as easy. Try yelling at Chet to “be more creative” and see how far it gets you.

Businesses thrive on new ideas, and having a work force that can develop them can be a significant driver of success. Experts in the area of creativity say there are steps your company can take to ensure it has people on board who can think outside the box and make sure those ideas don’t go to waste.

A famous example of creativity from within that was almost lost is the story of Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist for 3M who developed a reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive that didn’t leave residue. He tried for years to get the company to take notice of the product, but 3M wasn’t interested until a friend used it to keep bookmarks from falling out of his church hymnal. Silver developed the idea into the now-ubiquitous Post-It Notes.

Bring In Outsiders
Your company might not have any leading scientists on staff, but at the very least you can make sure that you have some people capable of thinking differently from the pack. Dr. Thierry Guedj is a professor and expert on workplace psychology at Boston University, and says the biggest killer of creativity at your company may be your hiring process.

“There’s a big tendency to hire people who are sort of clones of the supervisors, and people have a tendency to recruit people with very similar backgrounds with very similar goals and very similar values,” Guedj says. “You can’t get new ideas from recruiting everyone coming out of the same prestigious business school and everyone coming out of the same mold.”

Having a company full of similar thinkers might sound like a great idea, but Guedj warns it can also be incredibly dangerous in situations where innovative thinking is necessary. “When you take, for example, what’s been going on in the financial markets, what you see is there was a tremendous void in the creativity,” he says. “You had a lot of herd behavior, sheep behavior.”

Patrick Sweeney, executive vice president of international management consulting firm Caliper, says personality profiles can help executives identify which job candidates would be more creative than others. He says creative people typically have a need to express themselves and “put their own mark on the world.”

Change From Within
Once you hire the people you know are free-thinkers and have fresh perspectives to lend to the company, the job is still only half-finished. Without a working environment that encourages and rewards creativity, the experts say, all those thought balloons likely are going to wind up popping against the acoustical tiles.

One way to create an innovation-friendly environment at your company is to make sure the management team understands the creative process, and Barbara Spradling says the best way to do that is to watch creative people at work. Spradling is the director of The Innovation Institute in Charlotte, N.C., a program developed by the McCoil Center for Visual Art. At The Innovation Institute, executives work with experienced artists in an effort to bring some of what they learn about the creative process to their offices.

“What you learn from working with artists is they’re very free-flowing in their idea generation,” Spradling says. “What most business leaders come out and say is that’s one of the major learnings, that they were stopping ideas without learning if they would be the ideas that would save the company.”

She says that as a retired executive for a major bank, she worked in an environment where ideas were run through a gauntlet that overshadowed them. “In my business career, when an idea was generated … we typically took that idea through a set of critical thinking processes,” she says. The generation of ideas is the most important step, she adds, “and that’s where we as business leaders tend to spend the least amount of time.”

Embrace Risk
Working with artists allowed Spradling and others who have been through the Innovation Institute to learn how to simply let ideas be ideas, without worrying about whether or not they’ll work right away. “We are so conditioned in business to be risk-averse,” she says. “Artists take risks and accept failure as part of their process.”

“You have to be comfortable taking risks because if those ideas don’t come out of your head, they won’t go anyplace,” Sweeney says.

Spradling says one helpful approach she has taken has been to write ideas onto note cards and then let them sit for a few days. She says not immediately discarding ideas because they didn’t stand up to her critical thinking process has made it easier for her to come up with ideas.

Guedj says a creative environment is also one where employees feel motivated to be creative. “The second-biggest mistake employers make is they assume those people with disparate backgrounds are going to be inspired by the exact same things,” he says.

“For example, if you are looking to motivate a creative group, they’re going to value innovation beyond everything, so for them power, money and all those things are going to be very remote on their radar screen.”

The bottom line, Guedj says, is that creative people value creative freedom above most other things, and a company hoping to encourage creativity by simply opening its checkbook is in for a rude awakening. He says employers should instead allow its employees to do what they know best instead of placing too much control over them.

“I really believe that when you let people do what they love best, they will follow deadlines,” Guedj says. “The misunderstanding is when people believe their procedures are the most important things.”

Look in the Mirror
Employers have to be willing to look themselves in the mirror and examine which aspects of their businesses stifle creativity and be willing to make some changes, Guedj says. “There’s a lot of talk from the corporate world on encouraging creativity, but I think a lot of companies are run more like benign dictatorships,” he says. In environments such as this, where managers and executives keep a tight control over each minute of their employees’ work hours, creativity can’t find much room to take root and grow.

“You have to find what fosters creativity and you have to find what kills creativity,” Guedj adds. For example, mandatory meetings can interrupt certain employee’s creative processes while giving them nothing in return. Guedj says companies should look at things they take for granted and ask whether or not they’re truly necessary.

Spradling says companies should encourage their employees to become more intellectually curious and expose them to cultural activities, adding that creativity isn’t just something that can be picked up from reading a book. That hews very closely to the Innovation Institute’s mission, which doesn’t just urge creativity; it teaches creativity.

“The difference here is we don’t teach you tools and set processes,” she says. “The point here is it’s about teaching the individuals to understand their own creative potential. This is about how you change yourself to create innovation, to promote innovation.”