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Jose Luis Roces
Professor, Argentina
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Fostering Innovation by Leaders
The main challenge to improve innovation is how to develop leaders which stimulate and sustain innovation instead of just looking at the bottom line figures.
An innovative culture is the consequence of the behaviour and decisions of the leaders in any company.
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MAYBON, China
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Innovation Leadership and Culture Could you elaborate how to develop this type of leadership and culture in practical ways?
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shanmugam, Malaysia
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Innovation Leaders must Develop a Climate Leaders need to develop respect and trust to create a climate of openess for innovation.
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Toba Folaranmi
Consultant, Nigeria
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Innovation - Leadership - Culture I've always been intrigued by the product of the interplay of the three concepts (innovation, leadership and culture). Nigeria is a peculiar case study and I'd appreciate some additional insight in causes and effects between them, as well as useful models or concepts.
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Jose Luis Roces
Professor, Argentina
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How Leaders Stimulate Innovation Innovative leadership should combine creativity and discipline, emotion and passion in a very truly balanced behaviour.
Traditional companies prefer obedience and procedures instead of courage and risk.
So we need a new model for leadership. I recommend to read Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation from Jean Philippe Deschamps (IMD).
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Philip Oldfield
Project Manager, United Kingdom
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How Leaders can Create an Innovative Environment I agree leaders need to create an environment where innovation can flourish, however, it must be bounded with controls. This isn't to say that the controls should be autocratic or coercive. The environment where individuals and teams can use their creativity to find solutions rather than just identifying the problems.
Armenikis uses the term "Framing" for change initiatives, the same principal applies to creating your innovative environment. Have a sound governance, recognition and reporting procedure, bind this to a performance structure that encourages creativity, provide the communication channels from bottom to top, and you may find that innovation and creativity roll out the other side.
Don't hedge all your bets on innovation alone, as most of us are still walking rather than floating around in hover boots.
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Sokolova Tatiana, Russian Federation
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In Reality, the Role of Leaders in Innovation is not so Impressive Innovations hardly ever come from higher level of management, whether they might be political leaders or heads of big companies, as they are focused on stabilization of already existing products and services and consequently never risk trigger innovative ideas.
At the same time they understand that something has to be done to break through, but they fail to initiate new ideas.
So the driving engine for new ideas is either the lower level of organization which gives the innovative impulse to the system that later turns into a decision made as mentioned above, or the intellectual elite (scientists and designers) who remain comparatively free from any corporate obligations and are able to generate innovative ideas.
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Anneke Zwart
Student (University), Netherlands
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Innovation Leadership Skills Innovation has become an extremely important way to obtain competitive advantage. Therefore it is important to know what skills leaders should have to effectively manage the innovation process. Bel (2010) argues that the innovation process exists of two phases:
1. Front-end phase: This first phase is about the creation and conceptualization of innovations and is a phase in which the level of uncertainty is high. This phase needs the skills of creativity and vision.
2. Back-end phase: The second phase is about producing and launching the product. It requires high levels of discipline and effectiveness.
An innovation leader who solely owns the skills of creativity and vision, but lacks discipline and efficiency will not be able to identify and deal with the implications of the chosen technology has when the product is developed. As a result there will be problems in the implementation stage.
If a leader only possesses the skills needed for the back-end phase, market failures are likely to occur because the main vision and objectives of the organization are not considered.
Therefore, an efficient innovation leader needs to excel a combination of front-end phase skills AND back-end phase skills. A leader that possesses creativity and discipline will be better able to both identify and to develop innovations.
Source: Bel. R. (2010) “Leadership and Innovation: Learning from the Best” Global Business and Organizational Excellence Vol. 29 Iss. 2 pp. 47-60
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Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands
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Leadership Role in Digital Transformation HBS Prof. Iansiti and Microsoft CEO Nadella recommend that leaders should speed up and democratize the digital transformation effort in their corporation. This can be achieved by involving the entire workforce in innovation.
To succeed in digital transformation, the role of leaders is obviously crucial. Specifically leaders in digital transformation should:
- Embrace transformation (4 main areas: organizational structure, innovation process, technical architecture, technical deployment).
- Formulate a clear strategy and communicate the strategy constantly and everywhere.
- Design and establish an organizational and technical architecture to involve into to support your strategy.
- Implement a governance process to track, coordinate and integrate all technology projects.
- Focus on establishing agility in any business initiative.
- Support the innovators in your workforce.
- Train and coach employees to understand the potential of technology and data.
Neeley and Leonardi call this "Developing a Digital Mindset". They define a digital mindset as: "a set of attitudes and behaviors that enable people and organizations to see how data, algorithms and AI open up new possibilities and to chart a path for success in a business landscape increasingly dominated by data-intensive and intelligent technologies". A good point they make is that in order to develop this mindset employees not only have to LEARN new technological skills, but they also must be motivated to ACTUALLY USE these skills to create new opportunities. To accomplish this, 2 things are reported to be most important:
- Build a continuous learning culture (and teach/prepare the employees about that, promoting buy-in and confidence)
- Design and align (digital) systems and processes (to accelerate the adoption by the employees)
Sources:
Iansiti M. and Nadella S., "Democratizing Transformation: Give your entire workforce of the capacity to become innovators", HBR May-Jun 2022, pp.43-49
Neeley T. and Leonardi P., "Developing a Digital Mindset", HBR May-Jun 2022, pp.50-55
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Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands
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Levels and Types of Innovation Leaders ❗Also have a look at the very interesting and useful topic: Types and Levels of Innovation Leaders....
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Dr. Abhijeet Desai
Innovation Consultant, India
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Innovation and Culture of Openness @shanmugam: Creating a climate of openness for innovation involves fostering an environment where individuals feel comfortable sharing their ideas, taking risks, and collaborating without fear of crit...
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Anonymous
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Risk of Performance Indicators One of the most common things that appear successful on the outside but destroy on the inside is looking only at performance indicators, without having an honest plan to develop leaders from the fourt...
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Marcus G Barrios
Entrepreneur, United States
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Upper Management Must Catch Up @Sokolova Tatiana: I think you touch on something important. Innovative leadership must be taught at the upper management level in order to incorporate such thinking into the culture of an organizatio...
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Maurice Hogarth
Consultant, United Kingdom
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How to Innovate Innovation @MAYBON: hello.
I'd suggest that this is not so much an issue for 'management' as an issue for everyone in the organisation. Innovation is not something that is the responsibility only of management....
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ashraf Moriss
Project Manager, Egypt
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How to Have Effective Innovations Across the Organization Based on my experience leading a large team in an organization that was required to transition from traditional product features and specifications to a cutting-edge product strategy with innovation i...
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Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands
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How CEOs can Foster Innovation A very good contribution to the question how CEOs can foster innovation in their corporation was recently made by Professors McEvily and Ter Wal. They start their article by stating the obvious in tha...
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