Owner/CEO's Name & Business's Name
Karen Hough, Founder & CEO of ImprovEdge LLC
Year Established
2005
Why is your business unique and what's your pitch?
ImprovEdge uses improvisation to engage and elevate the performance of your most important asset - your people. We challenge people, teams and companies to get unstuck. The message of improvisation is meaningful during this time of economic stress. Improvisers arrive onstage without the common tools of theater - no make-up, script or props. Yet we create complete performances on our feet. From a phone line in our founder's basement to a presence in 8 cities, ImprovEdge works with organizations like JPMorgan, Turner Broadcasting, Nationwide Insurance and Victoria's Secret, to name a few.
What led you to start the business?
We met at Yale University as students in an improvisational comedy troupe. We went on to professional improvisation, training with Second City and performing in improv, scripted theater and TV. Those careers were wild and wonderful, and at some point, we all went further to hold executive positions in banking, the non-profit sector, and even network engineering. The funny part is that we (trained actors and improvisers) were doing far better in our business roles than we had any right to do! We all realized that improvisation served us well in business. The ability to think on your feet, arrive at solutions through the side door, and communicate in ways that bring people together are the skills of improvisation. These are the keys to innovation and business success. Yet, these skills are often overlooked. Thanks to many late nights, workshops with willing volunteers and endless research and testing, ImprovEdge was born. Since 1998, we have developed material with the assistance of Wharton Business School and Otterbein College and applied it to clients in industries as diverse as finance, manufacturing, law, retail, and technology. Originally headquarted in New York, NY, ImprovEdge is now based in Columbus, Ohio under the leadership of Karen Hough. We currently employ facilitators in New York, Columbus, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Burlington, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Lessons Learned
- Your best friends may not believe in your idea. That was a heartbreaker, and put IE on the backburner. However, the drive to pursue IE lead Karen Hough to get a phone line in her basement and finance her start-up with family credit cards. We now have a presence in 8 cities.
- Focus - When IE began to take off, all sorts of people came around looking for a piece of it with lots of "ideas" for expansion, none of which had anything to do with our core philosophy. Thanks to a great mentor, we focused on our strength and grew.
- Oops to Eureka! - every time we made a mistake, we approached it like improvisers - learn