Let us now talk about the principles of innovation and specifically talk about innovation management inside a company, and we will talk about the role of the chief of innovation there must be a chief of innovation. The efforts of corporate innovation in big companies very often lack a mission and clear frameworks. In a company that was analyzed, it was believed that no less than four different groups were working on innovation, nevertheless, none of them supported what was really happening at the level of the business unit. To make matters worse, the groups involved were competing internally for spaces and resources while the workload of others was doubled. It is not only a problem of the companies known for their bad administration and innovation management, even the companies who know well the best management practices, can, without being aware, generate a hostile atmosphere towards innovation. This is a particular problem for the first line business units of a company, whose business processes and performance metrics are optimized for relatively short-term objectives which are anchored in what they are doing or selling currently, instead of what they could be doing differently or in an innovative way. As a result, managers instinctively reject those innovations that will not immediately contribute with their objectives. This is precisely the reason why big companies need an innovation director, an innovation chief, who in English is called Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), a powerful executive who can counteract the natural killer instinct of the business units of a company and design a more favorable organization environment towards innovation. What does a Chief Innovation Officer do? Well, he favors the best practices this implies exploring and standardizing the market research methods for ideas, new knowledge, strategic innovations, promoting open innovation, for instance, which we will discuss later on, and introducing tools and group processes which promote creative thinking developing skills too, training the company staff on the skills they need, and developing and applying measures to track down the improvements on innovation and the abilities that back them up. Endorsement to those business units and new initiatives of products and services. It means acting as experts in methodologies and facilitators for the most critical innovation teams of the company, backing each other up to raise the objectives, to raise the bar of their aspirations. Training other managers also other colleagues to perform these roles which will favor innovation in the business units. Another task is the identification of new market spaces, this includes analyzing tendencies and market interpretation, seeking new opportunities of emerging markets. In some cases, these must be developed at a corporate level when they do not adjust to the limits of the current business units. Also helping individuals to generate ideas. Launching platforms and formats of generation of ideas such as improvised sessions, hackatons which are very popular, internal or external crowdsourcing on behalf of the corporation is a task of this Chief Innovation Officer, promoting this process of generating ideas with the internal or external staff but also without falling into what I call the “circus of innovation”. Many activities without being concrete with projects of value. Another activity that also corresponds to the Chief Innovation Officer is directing the initial funding to those innovative projects. Having and allocating an annual budget to fund ideas of individuals who take risks for those business units, who think differently to the limits we have in the commercial area and which currently exist, that could not be funded otherwise. Then, it is providing an organizational home to nurture and protect new ideas. Regarding that too, a role of this chief innovation officer is designing these refugees for innovative and promising projects taking this potentially disruptive innovations forward in that initial stage to the market without killing them on the way in order to protect the status quo. And well, obviously ,also something that is very important is corporate growth. For instance, when we observe one of those corporate innovation centers of Samsung, it is an examplie, it was seen that the company focused particularly on identifying the best practices, developing skills and favoring initiatives of the business units so that radical ideas would not be lost. At Samsung, the other aspects of the innovation process are relatively well managed at an operational level. What the company wanted to do was to create a kind of “first class” center which would be able to train the team members at a business unit level and support the most innovative and critical initiatives of the company. Then, drawing the seven roles in the spider web graphics as the ones shown can help the innovation chief officers to determine where they are presently focused and they may need to increase or reduce their energies in some of them. They may, for instance, compare what they are currently doing to what they should be doing given the strategical intention of their company and their organization management problems. Undoubtedly, innovation is a creative process based on knowledge, but having some management processes and an executive expert in organizations in charge makes all this exercise less prone to mistakes.
