(FORTUNE Magazine) – They are the hope of corporate America, at least according to their press clippings. They will rebuild our sagging companies from within. They will stave off the Japanese challenge. They will be home for breakfast. Call them innovators, creative types, or brilliant mavericks. They march --though not in formation, of course--under banners emblazoned PRODUCT CHAMPION, NEVER KILL AN IDEA, or, from a sweatshirt popular with Apple Computer employees, I WORK 90 HOURS A WEEK AND LOVE IT. Many conventional corporate people are suspicious of them. Robert Sternberg, a professor of psychology at Yale, studied how intelligence, creativity, and wisdom are perceived by different professions. Only business executives, he found, believed that the creative are not wise, nor the wise creative. Fortunately, more and more managers seem to be wising up, looking beyond both old suspicions and new hype to realize that there may be something to this idea of tending the creative flame within a company. ''Innovation is too important to be this year's fad,'' says William H. Weltyk, vice president of technology at Borg-Warner, a big Chicago-based equipment manufacturer. Drawing on his experience managing research in an industry a long way from Silicon Valley, Weltyk adds, ''There are many people who could be more innovative than they are.'' The drums of creativity beat even in smokestack country. The problem--or for all you go-getters out there, the challenge--is that these creative types apparently have to be managed differently than your average wage slave. Or so says just about everyone who has tried to harness their distinctive energy. Some standard managerial wisdom on how to go about the task is beginning to emerge. First, you have to figure out who the innovators are. Don't be misled, veterans of the exercise caution, by half-baked philistine folk wisdom: creative people do not necessarily wear plaid flannel shirts, handcrafted earrings, or loud ties. Their manner may not be flamboyant. Indeed, according to Lester C. Krogh, who heads R&D at that citadel of innovation, 3M: ''Many of our creative people lead daily lives that would appear to an outsider to be exceptionally dull.'' Not by their style but by their fruits ye shall know them. The only way to spot genuinely creative souls, the veterans say, is to notice who consistently comes up with good ideas. If you have sufficient managerial self-confidence to express an interest in doing things in new ways, and then--what's even harder --can keep your mind open to the suggestions brought to you, you shouldn't have much trouble distinguishing the innovative goats from the plaid-flannel sheep. Consider the variation among those poets of the new age, the authors of software. David A. Boucher, the president of Interleaf Inc., which produces software for work stations, observes, ''The best programmer produces literally 50 times as much as a bad programmer. The best ones produce work that mediocre people can never produce.''

Once you have identified the good ones, give them lots of room to maneuver. The first principle that virtually everyone who has managed creative types agrees on is that they have to be left to their own devices more than other employees, even to the extent of insulating them from the normal bureaucratic rules and imperatives. The process begins with you, their manager. ''One of the things we try to do,'' says Krogh of 3M, ''is to keep our mouths shut.'' He adds that at times it's also necessary to keep your eyes half-closed. Bootleg projects--work done without formal authorization--may not end up making money for the company, but ruthlessly eradicating them may cost you plenty in terms of the curiosity and initiative you'll need from the troops to make authorized projects a success. If you want to be sure that your creative cowboys and cowgirls don't get fenced in, you can set up a so-called skunk works--a facility apart from the rest of the corporation where innovators are sent to come up with new ideas in peace. IBM watchers caught the telltale odor emanating from an installation in Boca Raton, Florida, where the computer giant developed the PC. For all its current popularity, such a facility may not be a good idea, though, for reasons that go to the heart of managing creative types in a company that's perhaps not all that creative. ''If you have a skunk works as your only form of innovation, then the skunk works idea will be short-lived,'' says Gifford Pinchot III, consultant and author of Intrapreneuring, a new book on how to be entrepreneurial inside a corporation. When people, ideas, or new products eventually leave the skunk works and rejoin the rest of the company, the bureaucrats may attack them as white blood cells do bacteria invading the bloodstream. Andrew S. Grove, author of High Output Management and president of highly innovative Intel, frames the problem as even companies without a skunk works encounter it: ''You have to be careful that in your quest to cater to these people you don't create a new class system in place of the old one of executive dining rooms and reserved parking spaces.'' If yours is a relatively young company--an Interleaf or Apple Computer, say--you can partially avoid the problem by working to establish a culture that treats everyone like an innovator. If a mailroom clerk wants to park his bicycle in the office, so be it. In companies that have had time to ossify, you may have to be downright sneaky to avoid getting folks riled up, at least according to some experts. Pinchot recommends that managers school their creative types in skills well suited to an agent operating behind enemy lines: discretion, concealment, and camouflage. ''What you should tell a person,'' Pinchot says, ''is that attracting attention to himself is bad, not good.'' Nurturing innovators is not just training moles, however. For all the freedom afforded creative types, they do need to be managed. Much of what is critical to the process is just between you and them, and need not scare anyone else in the company. ONE DOES NOT TELL an innovator what to do. After discussing the matter with him, the two of you agree on a goal. Unless you both are working for Walt Disney Productions, the goal had better not be Mickey Mouse. ''We only ask our programmers to work on projects that we as a company are firmly committed to,'' says Boucher of Interleaf--no mucking around in the vice chairman's pet harebrained scheme. As another expression of your confidence in him, provide your creative subordinate with the resources he needs to reach the goal --enough money for him to do the job but not enough to get himself, you, or the company in serious trouble. . Joe Lee, an executive vice president of General Mills who got there partly by building the company's Red Lobster restaurants into one of the most successful chains in the U.S., sums up in a word the relationship you're trying to create: ''Trust.'' You trust him to work hard and try to do his innovative best. He trusts you to give him a long leash, to be interested and, if possible, helpful when he comes around for advice, and to stand behind him when his baby faces the world. ''Once you've done the editing on your people's effort, you must back them totally,'' asserts Barry Day, vice chairman of the McCann-Erickson Worldwide ad agency. ''On the day of the presentation, you must never move away from them and say, 'I agree with you, Client, I didn't like it either.' '' Within this framework you may occasionally have to supply firm guidance, even discipline, but here tread carefully indeed. You will want to help your innovator navigate periodic passages of insecurity, mostly with support but also by keeping the goal before him. ''You make sure that anything he can hide behind is slowly and surely taken away,'' suggests Day. ''If he says, 'I wouldn't have used that director,' you say, 'Fine, you choose the director.' '' Deadlines are also helpful in managing your creative flock. ''They seem to work best if they are event-driven,'' notes Jay Elliot, vice president for human resources of Apple Computer, citing the introduction of Apple's Macintosh machine--everybody knew it was to be trotted out at the annual shareholders' meeting, nobody could expect extra time. What you should not do by way of disciplining creative types is chew them out. Veteran managers report that this gets you nowhere, and may even set you back. ''You never yell at people,'' says David A. Litwack, vice president for development at Cullinet Software. ''You can lean on them if you feel they're doing something wrong, but they have to be treated as professionals.'' This includes being rewarded like professionals. Money is necessary--you have to pay them as much as their peers in industry get--but not sufficient. By now you should have figured it out: what these folks want is to turn their ideas into realities and to have the world, and in particular their colleagues who understand the details, bear witness and smile. IBM, which knows a little something about managing people, has a program it calls the IBM Fellows. The Fellows, typically scientists and engineers who have put in 15 to 20 years of consistently creative labor at the company, are given executive salaries, five years to work on what they want to, and resources to support their research. Why does IBM do it--in the hope of new, breakthrough products? No, says George S. Howie, director of technical personnel programs, it's ''primarily for recognition of outstanding work.'' Now, if somebody would just devise a program to recognize the real heroes of innovation--the people who manage the creative people. But then, maybe somebody already has. It's called a vice presidency.