Business is often stifling to creativity due to the inevitable pressures of establishing and maintaining profitability, managing employees, working effectively with vendors and just keeping your head above water. Sometimes creativity can seem like a huge time-waste or resource black hole. But it must be unleashed to allow growth and innovation.

Large industries such as traditional print journalism and print advertising are struggling to stay alive because they were slow to adapt and not able to incorporate creative new media solutions into their business plans.

Don’t let that happen to your business – the most successful businesses encourage creativity – such as Google’s famous “20% time” allowing certain employees to work on projects of their own choosing for which they have a personal passion or interest. GE as a large company is well known for encouraging innovation in-house and several other companies have in-house think-tanks whose entire job is innovation and creativity.

Thanks to @randfish for the pointer to this great presentation by BetsyStreeter.com below, which encourages everyone to allow creativity in order to stay a creative contributor.