Innovation leaders: a breed different from corporate managers
3 February 2010:
Ian MacMillan and Rita McGrath (both taught at a Spring 08 Columbia Business School program I attended) in an HBR article say “Most profitable strategies are built on differentiation: offering customers something they value that competitors don’t have.” And Harsh Mariwala, Chairman & MD, Marico Ltd says, “… innovation is the fountainhead for differentiation.” The importance of innovation in business is clear.
However, to most companies and managers, it is not clear where such innovation might come from. If you turn to management guru Tom Peters, his answer is “The number 1 source of innovation is pissed-off people.” These are people that are annoyed with the status quo. They want something different and much better. How would you identify such people? How would you encourage and retain such people in your organization? How would you actually get them to innovate? Here’s how: start by creating a senior leadership position in innovation. These innovation leaders will stimulate, sponsor, steer, and sustain innovation in your organization.
As Dr R A Mashelkar (Chair, National Innovation Foundation) says, “Unfortunately, the “I” in “ India ” has stood for imitation and inhibition for too long. It’s high time it stood for innovation.” Thankfully, a few organizations are taking initiatives to drive change. For example, NASSCOM runs an Innovation Initiative to encourage and support innovative practices across India’s IT Industry. NASSCOM knows that the next phase of growth has to be driven through Innovation – in technologies, products, and processes.
Some companies are responding. They are launching innovation groups and creating innovation leader positions. The problem is these groups are mostly trendwatching groups. So, the objective simply is to identify hot technologies invented elsewhere so the company can train and be ready. And the “innovation leaders” in these companies are good managers, but may not have Innovation leadership capabilities. They are often senior managers who are given Innovation as an additional responsibility. They may not have a track-record in innovation.
Who might qualify to be an Innovation leader? It is important to know a fundamental fact: Good corporate leaders need not be good innovation leaders. Innovation leadership is distinct from other mainstream types of corporate/project leadership. This is obvious if you are an innovation practitioner/leader like me, but “mainstream” managers may find it hard to believe. The position requires a special form of leadership and Jean-Philippe Deschamps, former VP at Arthur D. Little lists the following six attributes for an innovation leader:
- An unusual combination of creativity and process discipline
- The acceptance of uncertainty, risks and failures, coupled with an urge to make their staff learn from them
- A high degree of passion for their mission and for innovation, as well as the burning desire to share this passion with the staff
- The willingness to proactively search for external technologies and ideas and then to experiment with them
- The courage to stop projects, not just ot start them, and the flair to decide when to persist vs. when to pull the plug
- A talent for building and steering winning teams and a knack for attracting and retaining innovators.
To that list, I must add two very important capabilities:
- Change leadership: have you successfully executed any change initiative in your organization, preferably an innovation-driven Change initiative?
- Corporate entrepreneurship: have you launched successful groups or COEs?
With this new leadership position created and reporting preferably into the CEO, the organization has taken the first and most important step in driving growth and differentiation through innovation.
Source: Pradeep Henry on Nasscom Emerg Blog