Creating Innovation Leaders

This book focuses on the process of creating and educating innovation leaders through specialized programs, which are offered by leading academic schools. Accordingly, the book is divided into two parts. While the first part provides the theoretical foundations of why and how innovation leaders should be created, the second part presents evidence that these foundations can already be found in the programs of ten top-level universities. Part one consists of six chapters following a rigorous plan of content development, addressing topics ranging from (1) innovation, to (2) the settings where innovation occurs, (3) innovation leadership, (4) the need to change education, (5) a taxonomy of advanced educational experiences, and (6) cases of positive vs negative innovation leadership in the context of complex problems. Here the authors show that a new kind of innovation leadership is urgently needed, how it can be created, and how it is put into action. The second part is a collection of invited chapters that describe in detail ten leading academic programs: their objectives, curricular organization, enrollment procedures, and impact on students. Selected programs include four North American institutions (Stanford’s d.school, Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Engineering Faculty, Philadelphia University, OCAD’s Master of Design on Strategic Foresight & Innovation), five European institutions (Alta Scuola Politecnica of Milano and Torino, the EIT Master Program, Paris’ d.school, Brighton’s Interdisciplinary Design Program, Aalto University) and the Mission D program at Tongji University in China. The book is dedicated to all those who recognize the need to provide stimuli regarding innovation and innovation leadership, primarily but not exclusively in academia. These include, but are not limited to, professors, deans and provosts of academic institutions, managers at private organizations and government policy-makers – in short, anyone who is engaged in promoting innovation within their own organization, and who feels the need to expand the intellectual and practical toolbox they use in this demanding and exciting endeavor.

Innovation leaders promote and address the innovation agenda in their company. Through personal conviction or competitive necessity they are obsessed with providing superior value to customers through innovation. They know how to mobilize their staff behind concrete innovation initiatives and do not hesitate to personally coach innovation teams. For innovation to occur leadership has to be collective. To create a momentum for innovation in their company, leaders from different functions need to team up, to build innovation networks. Innovation leadership is not just an innate talent that can be selected at the hiring level. It can be developed within an appropriate company culture through careful leadership development, typically achieved through career management and coaching. Innovation leaders also need to stay on board and it is the responsibility of the top management team to create an attractive climate to develop and keep its innovation leaders. There are plenty of books that deal with innovation, or with new product development, or with leadership; this is different in its focus on the specifics of innovation leadership – that particular form of leadership that stimulates and sustains innovation. This book maps the broad territory of innovation leadership and contributes new thinking on the focus of the emerging leadership role of the CTO; distinction between ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ innovation leaders; the concept of aligning leadership styles with strategy; and the chain of leadership concept. Combining practice-based and empirical research-based observations with simple conceptual frameworks, illustrated by many company examples and case stories from a broad range of industries in the US and Europe, this is a systematic presentation of innovation drivers and their implications in terms of what leaders need to do to make it work.

"This unique text integrates a variety of viewpoints on leadership attributes and abilities that guide organizations and people through the process of advancement to successful innovation outcomes. This contributed text integrates a variety of viewpoints on leadership from both healthcare and business settings and provides the tool sets necessary to ensure successful innovation."--Back cover.

A leader's ability to discover and implement innovations is crucial to adapting to changing technologies and customer preferences, enhancing employee creativity, developing new products, supporting market competitiveness, and sustaining economic growth. Gliddon and Rothwell provide an exciting and comprehensive resource for readers that are currently seeking to build success in organizations with new ideas. Innovation leadership involves synthesizing different leadership styles in organizations to influence employees to produce creative ideas, products, services, and solutions. It is a practice and an approach to organization development and organizational change. Innovation leadership commonly includes four basic stages, which are: (a) support for idea generation, (b) identifying innovations, (c) evaluating innovations, and (d) implementation. There are two types of innovations, including: (a) exploratory innovation, which involves generating brand new ideas, and (b) value-added innovation, which involves modifying and renewing ideas that already exist. The two fundamental leadership theories that are generally necessary for innovation leadership are path-goal theory and Leader Member Exchange theory. The key role in the practice of innovation leadership is that of the innovation leader. However, there are currently multiple perspectives on the definition of an innovation leader. An individual in an organization, a group within an organization, the organization itself, and even a community, state, or nation can be considered an innovation leader. The book explores each of these perspectives on the definition of an innovation leader.

SHORTLISTED: CMI Management Book of the Year 2017 - Innovation and Entrepreneurship Category Being a truly innovative company is more than dreaming up new products and services by external consultants and internal taskforces. Staying one step ahead of the competition requires you to embed innovation into your organizational culture. Innovation needs to be embodied in everything that gets done by everyone who works there. By changing your organizational culture to one that supports Building a Culture of Innovation, you will remove the barriers that stop you responding quickly and agilely to changing market conditions and opportunities for growth. Building a Culture of Innovation presents a practical framework that you can follow to design and embed a culture of innovation in your business.The six-step Innovation Culture Change Framework offers a structured process to make change stick, from assessing your organization's innovation-readiness to leading a managed change process that will foster innovation at each level. It includes case studies from international organizations which have shifted their focus to an innovation culture, including Prudential, Qinetiq, Octopus Investments, Cisco, Siemens, BrightMove Media, Waitrose and Feefo. Supported with downloadable resources, Building a Culture of Innovation is an essential read for business leaders and change implementation teams who want to place innovation at the heart of their business strategy.

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help—but there’s only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it—and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a “good” leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the “collective genius” of the people in the organization. Using vivid stories of individual leaders at companies like Volkswagen, Google, eBay, and Pfizer, as well as nonprofits and international government agencies, the authors show how successful leaders of innovation don’t create a vision and try to make innovation happen themselves. Rather, they create and sustain a culture where innovation is allowed to happen again and again—an environment where people are both willing and able to do the hard work that innovative problem solving requires. Collective Genius will not only inspire you; it will give you the concrete, practical guidance you need to build innovation into the fabric of your business.

This book offers a holistic model for what it calls "innovation leadership," which includes entrepreneurial action,creative energy fields within organizations, high-tech wealth creation, and innovation as a business process.

How to Innovate and Execute Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business—one that is still thriving—while dramatically reinventing it? How do you envision a change in your current business model before a crisis forces you to abandon it? Innovation guru Vijay Govindarajan expands the leader’s innovation tool kit with a simple and proven method for allocating the organization’s energy, time, and resources—in balanced measure—across what he calls “the three boxes”: • Box 1: The present—Manage the core business at peak profitability • Box 2: The past—Abandon ideas, practices, and attitudes that could inhibit innovation • Box 3: The future—Convert breakthrough ideas into new products and businesses The three-box framework makes leading innovation easier because it gives leaders a simple vocabulary and set of tools for managing and measuring these different sets of behaviors and activities across all levels of the organization. Supported with rich company examples—GE, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hasbro, IBM, United Rentals, and Tata Consultancy Services—and testimonies of leaders who have successfully used this framework, this book solves once and for all the practical dilemma of how to align an organization on the critical but competing demands of innovation.