How to be successful as innovation leader
When my company decided to create the position of Innovation Leader, what profile did they look for?
- Broad experience in healthcare to deeply understand the key issues. At that time, I had 30 years of experience with this Pharma company in sales, marketing, operations and strategy at country, regional and global level.
- Networks in the corporation to facilitate collaboration. In my previous jobs, I worked closely with other divisions, like manufacturing (e.g. to plan new product launches and to manage vaccine supply) and IT (e.g. to create a global, automated tender management system).
- Multicultural experience as the job covered most global geographies. I had worked in 4 countries across 3 continents, traveled in over 40 countries, spoke 4 languages and had 25 managers from 10 nationalities.
- Open, curious, innovation minded. I always liked to try out new things such as adapting physician marketing tools to DTC and tender management or working in a public-private partnership in China.
That of course only got me the job. What helped me then to succeed as global Innovation Leader? A few examples, in order of importance (and alphabetically):
Always giving: time, attention, inspiration, mentorship, encouragement, resources, protection, connections.
- What followed was trust and an overwhelming number of innovative ideas and experiments.
- Example: at monthly 1-1 calls with local innovation leaders, I shared innovation-stimulating activities and inspiring experiments from other countries.
Being there: personally, close to innovators and close to local innovation leaders.
- Frequent, direct contact ensured that innovators stayed focused on solving the priority business challenges, catalyzed innovation experiments and helped identify key barriers for innovation.
- Example: I traveled the globe to engage in person with passionate innovators to discuss in depth their ideas and the progress of experiments. While there, I learned from local innovation leaders, mentored them and engaged with their leadership team – and their antagonists.
Connecting: top down, bottom up and horizontally; internally and externally.
- This created networks of passionate colleagues to learn from and opportunities to bring together those with complementary capabilities.
- Example: I frequently lectured about inspiring innovations and innovation stories at congresses and at internal staff meetings to communicate, to inspire and to be known as a go-to person for innovation.
Driven: optimistic, problem focus, curiosity.
- A can-do attitude inspired innovators to overcome their challenges; focus on the business problems helped identify the right innovative ideas, focus on the systematic problems innovators struggled with helped to develop company-wide solutions.
- Example: proactively asking for and deeply understanding the problems of innovators and local innovation leaders provided an opportunity to share how others in the corporation had addressed similar problems (or to ask my network for ideas).
As Steve Jobs said:
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
So, as Innovation Leader, it is important to have the right background, the right mindset and to be there at the right time to stimulate innovation in the corporation.
More about this topic: 10 top skills of the best innovation managers, by Nick De Mey at Board of Innovation.
Do you agree, or not? Please share below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele