What to Look For in an Innovation Leader
Posted on 11. Mar, 2010 by James A Gardner in Relationships
One of the key questions one needs to resolve at the commencement of an innovation programme is what sort of innovator you should hire to lead everything.
This is an especially important decision, because whether you’ve determined to have a central innovation team or a distributed one that builds an innovation culture, everything that happens will be dependent on what mentality the leader brings to the table.
One option is to put an entrepreneur in charge: an individual with proven capacity to being small ventures and run them to success. The kind of person who knows everything necessary to run an enterprise on a shoestring and can match limited resources to big problems. This is a leader who has proved they have what it takes to turn individual ideas into something valuable.
On the other hand, is it a better choice to get someone who has experience managing portfolios of activity? Such an individual knows how to make decisions to start things, but also can shut them down. They may not have a great deal of project management experience, but they certainly know how to optimise overall returns.
Most people, given the choice would go for the former. It is the easy choice to make: choose someone you know will at least make a few things they choose to focus on succeed.
Regrettably, the obvious choice is not always the best one.
Innovation leaders who are entrepreneurial will be highly motivated to make their pet projects successful no matter the cost. This, after all, is the way they got to be leaders in the first place. They take good ideas and through personal heroics, make them into something worthwhile. Often, their whole careers have been based on a few lucky successes.
Individual heroics are all very well, but most things innovators try will not work no matter how much effort it put in. The entrepreneur accepts this, and calls it quits at an appropriate moment so they can start working on their next big thing. They live in the hope that this time they will have a big success.
For innovation teams in larger organisations, however, this is a very bad strategy. Innovation leaders usually last about 18 months before their stakeholders get sick of waiting for results. Doing things in the sequential order of the entrepreneur means that that time runs out way before there are decent result. The implication is that hiring an investor is usually sensible.
Innovators with an investment mentality intuitively understand that the name of the game in innovation is avoiding concentrations of risk that that it is possible to generate repeatable returns. To do so means doing many simultaneous projects, rather than concentrating on a few.
Is this the time you commence planning an innovation program and are mulling over your recruitment options? James Gardner’s free online resource has genuine advice on how to recruit an innovation leader.