Artificial intelligence is making CEOs who have always thirsted for innovation even thirstier. Using AI tools, teams can rewrite some old rules about speed and cost to increase their productivity and shorten time to market. Just as enticingly, teams can innovate quickly to respond to customer desires, improving customer satisfaction and retention. Thinking even bigger, teams can open up entirely new lines of revenue. It’s a good time to be a leader who thrives on change, because the drive to innovate at all these levels is strong.

That’s the good news. The tough news is that the AI tools won’t be the biggest blockers of innovation success. The people challenges will.

For example, leaders who want innovative ideas need to create a high degree of psychological safety. “Innovation flourishes when people on a team openly debate and disagree,” note Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, and Taeya Howell. But psychological safety is just the start of healthy debate, they say. Read the full article and you’ll see this issue in a new light, with the help of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

Given the importance of innovation to leaders right now, we gathered this article collection to give you a concentrated dose of wisdom. These 10 excerpts and their corresponding articles share pragmatic advice from MIT Sloan Management Review’s community of authors, including executives and academic experts from MIT Sloan and other world-class institutions. The final two articles give you a look at how two companies known for innovation, Lego and Colgate-Palmolive, continue to break new ground. Lego offers valuable lessons in profiting from customer ideas, while Colgate-Palmolive models how to best pair innovative people and generative AI tools. Delve into these articles and increase your innovation power — and your team’s.

Here are the first three of ten articles recommended by the Editors of MIT Sloan Management Review.

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1. A Better Way to Unlock Innovation and Drive Change

Diya Kapur Misra, Linda A. Hill, Gaurav Laroia, and Christiane Hamacher

“In our hard-won experience in organizational transformation projects at several companies, we found that the idea of large-scale transformation can leave employees feeling overwhelmed and insecure about their ability to thrive in the new order. But we learned that by deploying a strengths-based approach at the individual level and then using it to constitute and manage diverse teams, we could win employee commitment to transformation. This approach can help reduce anxiety and burnout, increase inclusive and collaborative behaviors, and cut across hierarchical and functional boundaries. It creates agents of change with the power to contribute to a shared purpose and bold ambition rather than victims of change who feel powerless and fearful.”

2. Why Great Ideas Die on Managers’ Desks — and How to Save Them

Vijaya Venkataramani and Kathryn M. Bartol

“The very novelty that makes an idea valuable to an organization and likely to generate extraordinary rewards is the same quality that makes it difficult for managers to appreciate an idea. Organizations thrive on the ability to disrupt norms and embrace the unfamiliar, yet managers’ mental models often favor the predictable and familiar. How can this critical dilemma be resolved? …

“Our research points to a powerful yet straightforward solution: Managers need to build diverse personal networks within their organizations and beyond. The link between having a diverse social network and being innovative is no secret — it’s a cornerstone of creativity research. But our findings add a twist: Diverse connections not only help employees generate more creative ideas; they are critical in allowing managers to evaluate and recognize the worth of employees’ ideas.”

3. Beating ‘Not Invented Here’ Syndrome

Rolf-Christian Wentz

“NIH [‘not invented here’] syndrome is a bias against ideas perceived as coming from outsiders. This bias can affect anyone in an organization. While there are rational reasons to reject some external knowledge — say, for intellectual property concerns or technical incompatibilities — this bias is often the driver, and it can be economically damaging when it leads to missed opportunities and fewer innovations. One research study surveyed 565 innovation projects from around the globe and found that only 16% of them remained entirely unaffected by NIH syndrome. This bias against outside ideas positively correlated with a reduced likelihood of project success.

“My research into this phenomenon found that it can manifest at all levels of an organization and to different degrees, but can be most entrenched among two types of individuals: doubters and resisters. Both lack motivation and hold strong negative attitudes toward external knowledge.”