Securing leadership sponsorship When a leadership team decides that their employees should innovate (more), an Innovation Leader is assigned. Then what? As Innovation Leaders we are thus made responsible to stimulate innovation in a corporation. This is mostly a bottom up exercise, reinforced with a regular top down nudge. Consequently, we must not only engage potential innovators, collaborators and catalysts, but also secure continued strong sponsorship, engagement and support from the leadership. There are several ways to help our leadership in this nudging: Focus. Leadership is about setting direction and making choices. As Innovation Leaders, we should make sure leadership choses a few key business issues innovations should be generated…
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Best of the Best
Innovation Leader characteristics Every Innovation Leader has unique skills, capabilities, experiences, mindset, personality, etc. I’m referring here to those Innovation Leaders who are responsible 1. to stimulate innovation in their country or region 2. to support local innovators through their innovation journey. These Innovation Leaders have (mainly Horizon 2) innovation as an additional responsibility to their regular job. There are desired traits that make an Innovation Leader especially effective. Following are some of my observations and examples from a few selected geographies. Passion and Positiveness. Innovation Leaders in Mexico, Australia Spain, Italy, Canada and Turkey, all busy marketers, developed a full blown “innovation marketing campaign” to create awareness in their…
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Constraints
Innovation driven by limitation More money = more innovation? Wrong! Based on my experience, I believe it’s often just the other way around. Large corporations typically have many resources to drive business objectives. In many cases, business goals are met by doing more (or more efficient) of what worked in the past. Why take a risk with something new, uncertain, especially when senior leaders have limited expertise with it and you may be blamed for a potential failure? I recall the launch of a new, very good medicine where the marketing team benchmarked the best launches of recent brands. Then they increased each of the activities those brands used with…
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Mindset
Measuring it… How innovative are we? Where are we on the innovation continuum? How is the pace of our progress? What are the gaps? A key role of an Innovation Leader is to stimulate innovation, including creating an innovation mindset. This can range from encouraging employees to experiment with innovative ideas to ensuring corporate leaders publicly celebrate innovations and recognize innovators. Measuring all of this can be daunting. The easiest part is likely assessing corporate leadership behavior. It’s per definition qualitative: Innovation Leaders can directly observe how often corporate leaders mention “Innovation” in their speeches, support innovations, allocate resources, etc. It’s more of a challenge to measure the mindset of…