Championing innovation Innovation in a corporation needs to be driven by strong senior leaders – top down. Innovations are developed by all employees across the organization – bottom up. And then there is this critical group in the middle: managers, directors, VPs, … They have typically been successful within the traditional organization: executing flawlessly, driving efficiencies, managing within the corporate culture. They may be hesitant to stimulate an innovation mindset in their part of the corporation as they may not be familiar and comfortable with innovation. They might ask themselves questions like: “What is it?”, “How does it work?”, “What is my role?”,… Innovation Leaders should play a major role…

Innovating under the radar One of the most intriguing articles I read when I started in my Innovation Leader role was about Stealth Innovation. The authors describe why and how innovators in large organizations can successfully innovate under the radar. Stealth innovation avoids that new ideas are too quickly reviewed and thus get a “no” by a busy CEO/Leadership. Even if an idea is approved, it may get too much visibility too soon and might get torpedoed by the “corporate antibodies”: it’s easy to find reasons why something new will not work. Stealth innovation works by getting support from a lower level manager: there are more of them and they…