Knock Down Barriers to Innovation: Welcome to the HBR Insight Center

We've all seen them in action: the rules, bureaucracies, and wrongheaded policies that prevent us and our organizations from being as innovative as we could be. These obstacles seem to rise up at every turn, stifling our creativity and keeping our companies from getting a step on the competition. They're tough to overcome, and even if we succeed in eliminating one, another pops up.

And then there are the psychological constraints on our thinking and the untested assumptions that we live by, barriers that are even more pernicious because they are hard to see in the first place.

With the "Knock Down Barriers to Innovation" Insight Center, HBR.org aims to help you identify innovation barriers that have been hiding in plain sight and to show you novel ways of defeating them.

Over the next four weeks, blog posts from some of the leading lights on innovation — as well as a number of thinkers who will be unfamiliar to you — will take you on a tour of the conventional wisdom about innovation, pointing out illusions along the way. They'll also provide tools for freeing the mind and implementing sound ideas. The posts will inspire as well as inform.

The Insight Center, which complements a special spotlight on innovation in the May issue of HBR, also offers a sampling of some of the provocative books, articles, and blog posts that HBR has recently published on overcoming innovation barriers.

As part of this insight center we would like to draw on one other group of experts — you. What's stopping you from being more innovative in your work right now? If you could change one thing about your job or your workplace to make you more effective, what would it be? Here's a chance to knock down some barriers of your own.

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Knock Down Barriers to Innovation.

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