The competition for the world’s first management innovation prize has officially closed—and the judging has begun! We’d like to send out a hearty thanks to the hundreds of MIXers who poured their bold thinking and tremendous effort into crafting STORIES and HACKS aimed at tackling the moonshots of Increasing Trust , Reinventing Leadership , and Taking the Work out of Work . We are inspired and energized by the sheer variety and originality of the submissions—and we and our panel of Mavericks are hard at work on the difficult task of choosing just a few winners.

For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.