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How Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines
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How Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines

by Felix Mosner, Fabian Sting, Aravind Chandrasekaran
July 2026
Intermediate
6 pages
17m
English
MIT Sloan Management Review
Content preview from How Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines

How Leaders Unlock Innovation on the Front Lines

Front-line employees have the knowledge and potential to develop invaluable innovations — but without managerial support, their promising ideas may never surface.

Balancing the daily grind of operations with the spark of innovation is one of the most persistent challenges managers face.1 Regulatory compliance, performance metrics, and the never-ending demands of customers can easily crowd out creative thinking. Work overload or mismanaged operations elevate employee stress, which directly constrains ideation capacity. This cognitive bottleneck triggers a cascade of quality incidents that require downstream intervention, further ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 53863MIT68123