Читать книгу Advancing Innovation - Patrick J. Stroh - Страница 23

Not that long ago, the title “Chief Innovation Officer” would have been sneered at as a made-up or lofty title with very little real responsibility in an organization. That’s no longer the case, as one Director of Innovation Strategy, Harvey Wade, explains: “Due to greater competition, tightened budgets, and new technology, the importance assigned to innovation as a legitimate and vital business process has been elevated in recent years. This has placed a newfound importance of whoever’s responsibility it is to ensure innovation is being encouraged and helping to deliver results… Globalization, the recession, and the fact consumers have more information available to them has certainly created a more crowded and competitive business landscape. Companies are under huge pressure to evolve at a new pace, stay ahead on a realistic budget [i.e., do more with less], and squeeze as much as possible out of what they’ve got.”⁵

In short, companies need to execute their current offerings as best as possible to aid in funding new improvements and ventures. This requires constant innovation.

Wade goes on to say:

“To ensure consistent and meaningful progress, decision makers within companies must ask the right questions about the current state of the organization, the industry, and where they are both heading—seemingly obvious analysis [that] many businesses fail to do adequately.

“Finding answers to these questions, and solutions to the issues they raise, is even less frequently mastered. This process extends beyond the decision makers or boardroom, and its success relies on the effective use of an already existing asset of the organization—its people.

“Within business departments, incremental innovation is common, but especially in large or diverse organizations, someone is needed to manage the transformational strategic innovation that straddles the entire business, [and that person needs to have] buy-in from the CEO [who is traditionally responsible for business direction and strategy] and [who] can galvanize the whole workforce [to consistently and systematically provide innovation value.]”⁶

Who is responsible for innovation in your company? Do you have a Chief Innovation Officer? A Director of Innovation? Do you have an “Innovation Council” or group of innovation champions throughout your business?

In Chinese philosophy, the yin and yang describe how apparently opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary.

The answers to these questions vary from company to company and most of the time are dictated by size. In many Fortune 100 companies, you’ll find a Chief Innovation Officer. Sometimes you’ll find this title combined with business strategy like one of my prior positions, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer. Other times, it is shared responsibly across an Innovation Council or some sort of steering committee rather than a single person. How you centralize or decentralize the roles and responsibilities for innovation leadership can vary, but you have to cover them one way or another. This chapter focuses on what the responsibilities are.