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Wednesday, April 2, 2008 

Title: Chief Innovation Officer

Reference: Samuel, Phil. “The Dawn of a New Raising Star: The Chief Innovation Officer.” American Management Association. MWorld Spring 2008. pp.30-33.

Part of the role of the leadership of any organization, especially private organizations, is to strike the right balance between current and future operations. Which markets do you need to be in the future? Where is growth going to come from in your industry? How will you be best positioned to capture it in the future? Lately, I have been wondering exactly whose job it is to focus on profitable growth. Clearly part of the responsibility lies with the CEO and the rest of the executive management team.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008   

Title: Chief Innovation Officer

Reference: Samuel, Phil. “The Dawn of a New Raising Star: The Chief Innovation Officer.” American Management Association. MWorld Spring 2008. pp.30-33.

Part of the role of the leadership of any organization, especially private organizations, is to strike the right balance between current and future operations. Which markets do you need to be in the future? Where is growth going to come from in your industry? How will you be best positioned to capture it in the future? Lately, I have been wondering exactly whose job it is to focus on profitable growth. Clearly part of the responsibility lies with the CEO and the rest of the executive management team. However, I don’t recall any position specifically described as “responsible for developing, nurturing, and executing on profitable future growth projects”.  Perhaps there should be such a designee that is specifically focused on future product, services, hot house processes, and the like to ensure that the development pipeline stays full at all times. Moments of inspiration are probably not sufficient to sustain innovation, as they are often overwhelmed by the realities of satisfying current customers and requirements. In the referenced article the commentator indicates that companies are developing the position of Chief Innovation Officer, because the other roles don’t cover it. “Companies believe that CEOs are too busy setting the overall direction for business growth to also be responsible for leading and managing the challenging and difficult innovation and growth process.” So companies like Coca-cola, Intuit, AMD, and Citigroup are expanding the executive office to include a chief of innovation.  The commentator indicates that an innovation chief helps to develop the innovation culture to include the creation of discontinuities (e.g. Apple and iPod), build a corporate growth strategy, increase team and collaboration, and manage an innovation portfolio. “The chief innovation officer …ensures that the CEO’s vision remains on track.” This concept makes a lot of sense to me because it is difficult in the abstract to allocate resources for future growth without a good development blueprint and a properly positioned champion. A champion with sufficient status and authority is required to keep interdepartmental in-fighting to a minimum to be sure talent gets assigned to the right projects. One question that I have is how do you decide when to get an innovation chief? What are the rights skills for the person to have? Every situation is different; every business model could produce a different result. At the very least this should be part of the execution discourse and some assignments have to be made. Otherwise the growth profile and innovation are bound to flounder. Let me know your thoughts on how you have or would address this matter.