JD

Once upon a job description

There are as many job descriptions for Innovation Leaders as there are Innovation Leaders. How to create one? It doesn’t have to be complicated. Let me share my story.

When “my” leadership team decided to create the role I would take on, they had a very clear rationale. When they visited countries around the globe to review local business plans, they noticed that in many countries local employees came up with innovative solutions for important business/customer problems. Although this was encouraging news, the leadership team was concerned, because

• they were not aware of all the innovations that went on in their organization; they realized that there had to be many more “out there” than the ones that were presented to them
• they were not sure the showcased innovations really worked, as they usually only saw a polished, short PowerPoint presentation
• they were worried about wasted resources; as successful innovations were usually only known and launched in one country, other countries wasted time and resources trying to address the same problem

Thus, to address this concern, the leadership team created the position for an Innovation Leader. They provided a very simple job description:

1. Identify the innovations that are happening in the different countries where we have subsidiaries, support and evaluate those innovations and bring the valuable ones to the leadership team with a recommendation to scale them across the organization
2. Stimulate an innovation mindset across the organization, so more innovations will emerge

This clarity helped me to do my job effective, focused. It also allowed me to align all related activities, like

• all local (country and regional) Innovation Leaders got the same job description, of course limited to their country
• all events I set up, e.g. Innovation Leader Summits and monthly webcasts we organized around those 2 tasks in my JD
• all communications into the organization and towards the leadership team covered both tasks
• all metrics were aligned with those same 2 tasks

I started my role in the Emerging Markets organization (Asia Pacific, Latin America, Mid East Africa). Because of the success there, after a few years, the leadership team for Europe, Canada, China, Japan asked me to pursue the same goals in their region. 

As T. Dewar said:

“Minds are like parachutes; they work best when open.”

So, as Innovation Leader, starting out with a clear job description helps to drive all innovation activities in a focused, aligned and sponsored way.

More about this topic: The Chief Innovation Officer Job Description, by Soren Kaplan  

What do you think? Please share below!

More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele