ABSTRACT
A curatorial approach to leadership offers a means through which leaders can support, encourage, and showcase the creativity of their followers while allowing their own creativity to flourish. In this chapter, we elaborate upon the curatorial perspective of creative leadership by contrasting it with two alternative metaphors—the champion and the portfolio manager. Leaders act in a curatorial role when they allow others to initiate, develop, and receive credit for autonomous creative contributions while they themselves initiate, develop, and take credit for organizing or collecting these contributions into coherent groupings, and sampling from these groupings to develop new contributions that reframe groups of ideas. We propose that curatorial leaders might logically aim to assemble ideas that represent different types of creativity from the perspective of their general business operations and that alternate framings may serve to alter these creative profiles in ways that can reveal new value propositions.
