With almost 60% of employees saying they are very or extremely interested in participating in upskilling programs per a joint Gallup-Amazon survey, chances are your employees are interested too. So why are 57% of workers taking their education into their own hands? Most corporate learning programs aren’t cutting it because they lack the necessary element of creativity.

When I was brought on as Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney 10 years ago, I was asked to embed a culture of innovation and creativity into the company’s DNA. The company had recently bought Marvel, Pixar, ESPN, Lucasfilm, and ABC, and all those teams were working separately with different innovation processes. Additionally, the company realized it needed concrete training and tools for innovators — just like lawyers go to law school and IT experts take computer science classes.

It took me four tries to get it right. First, I brought in innovation consultants. They were good, but not much changed. Second, I launched an internal innovation team. People outside the team thought, “Innovation must be their job, not ours.” Third, we partnered with young tech startups through an accelerator program. Innovation happened but only touched about 1% of our population.

We had failed. Then, the “Aha!” moment happened.

To discover the details, read the full article on Harvard Business Review.

Photo Credit: Westend61 / Getty Images / HBR