What to Look For in an Innovation Leader

By James A Gardner

The main question that needs resolving at the start of an innovation programme is what kind of innovator you're going to hire to lead your programme.

The leadership hiring decision is a very important one, because no matter whether you're building a central innovation team or one which is distributed and responsible for creating an innovation culture, what happens next will be very dependent on the mentality the leader brings to the table.

Should you put an entrepreneur in charge, someone with proven capability to start and run small ventures? The kind of person that knows everything about working on a shoestring and matching limited resources to big problems? A leader, in other words, with proof they can turn an idea into something that works?

Alternatively, is it better to hire someone with significant experience managing portfolios of activity, and who know just how to make decisions to start things as well as how to stop them. Now, such an individual probably doesn't have a great deal of experience in the low down day to day running of projects, but they certainly are able to make investment decisions.

Given the choice, most stakeholders will hire the former. It seems a sensible choice to make: why not choose someone who has at least proved that when they focus on something, they'll get it to work?

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 an innovation leader in a corporate organisation, though, this is just about the worst strategy possible. Because innovation programmes last about 18 months, doing things sequentially means you run out time way before you have decent results. This is why hiring someone with an investment mentality is a good idea.

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.

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About The Author
Is this the time you start an innovation program and are thinking about your recruitment options? James Gardner's free online resource has genuine advice on how to hire an innovation leader.