Google was one of the first companies to recognise the cerebral and creative nature of workers with its 20% time allocation for creative tasks, though Intel has been there too, without much success.

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Actually, holding out guarantees of remuneration for engaging in tasks induces people to generate less creative and lower quality outputs.

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No matter what position you hold within a company, your job is to tackle the most critical tasks on your plate, bring creative problem-solving to your challenges, and make excellent decisions.

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Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children's toy.

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Walking away from a problem to do simple, routine tasks, and letting the mind wander in the process, can spark creative new connections or approaches to solving dilemmas, says a 2012 study in Psychological Science.

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