Midlevel managers play a crucial role in every company’s innovation process, as they shepherd partially formed ideas into fully fledged business plans in an effort to win funding from senior management. It is the middle managers who must decide which of the ideas that come bubbling in or up to them they will support and carry to upper management for approval, and which ideas they will simply allow to languish. This is a key reason why companies employ middle managers in the first place. Their job is to sift the good ideas from the bad and to make good ideas so much better that they readily
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