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 country. Their self motivation compelled about 15 colleagues from different divisions across each subsidiary to voluntary join their innovation-stimulation team. The campaigns they created generated diverse opportunities such as innovation competitions and dozens of innovation experiments addressing key business and customer challenges. The Innovation Leaders were very comfortable with uncertainty: they approached challenges like “we’ve never done this before” or leadership skepticism in some countries, with a can-do attitude. They just kept moving forward, learning, building capabilities and regularly asking for forgiveness, rather than permission.
• Collaboration and Communication. A Middle East Regional Innovation Leader truly broke down the silos between Marketing and IT in each of the countries in his region and demonstrated over and over how communication across all levels creates new opportunities. He developed a very successful open innovation challenge and secured leadership sponsorship, shared customer understanding and business focus. He timely engaged other stakeholders, like legal/compliance. He was the driving force behind a smart internal and external communication campaign, through social media. The impact of this open innovation challenge was so valuable that it has now become a larger and larger annual event.
• Empathy and Engagement. Several Regional and Country Innovation Leaders, including in Asia, Dubai and Lebanon deeply understood the local culture and their leadership’s business needs. They adapted their approach by being personally very closely involved with the local innovators: training, inspiring, guiding, connecting and protecting them, while setting clear milestones and deadlines to bring the experiments to a timely conclusion (successful or not). They were reliable, flexible and committed but firm partners for the emerging innovators. And they celebrated those local innovators.

Successful Innovation Leaders in a large corporation need of course many other capabilities like organizational acumen, strategic insight, networking, expertise and securing resources. The especially positive stories I selected above left me a particular impression and had significant impact.

As John Maxwell said:

““The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”

Do you agree? Disagree? Please share below!

More about this topic: Start an innovation program

More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele