LEADERSHIP INSIGHTS

Innovation Insight: The Art of Innovation Management

James Askew
James Askew
Board Director & CTO | Mon 21 Jul
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Innovation Insight: The Art of Innovation Management

July's Innovation Research Group heard from Professor Victor Newman on the Art of Innovation Leadership.

Professor Newman argues that success begins and ends with people. Innovation processes are useful and can be very powerful as disciplined tools for managing attention and integrating learning.

However, if you don’t understand the psychology of innovation leadership, then your approach to innovation in your business or work is like driving your car with your eyes closed: it can be done, but the results tend to be messy, and you’ll never know what you are missing.

Below we have shared some insights from the meeting’s discussions:

· Innovation processes are useful, but innovative people are essential: individuals need to understand themselves (capabilities and limitations), and organisations and teams need to have the right mix of behaviours to innovate. It’s essential to recruit people who think innovating is part of their everyday work.

· Instead of focusing on functional roles, organisations need to build teams with a specific mix of personality traits in order to manage current value and create new market value.

· Attempt to build a team around the following four behaviours:

(1) Stabiliser: building quality delivery systems for products and services (these people tend to enjoy disciplined work, but are quite rigid and may overlook how to translate their work into new applications and market opportunities)
(2) Navigator: anticipating what is coming, and knowing when to get in or out (tend to be disciplined but can move fluidly from a tactical to strategic perspective and back again to see the bigger picture)
(3) Translator: connecting new ideas to market opportunities (tend to have low discipline but high contextual awareness to understand that the market status quo needs to be disrupted)
(4) Creator: generating new disruptive ideas (tend to have low discipline but are intrinsically motivated by intellectual ideas and patterns outside of the dominant business context)

These behaviours should, however, be balanced: if one is too dominant, the team could collapse. For instance, during a period of stability, a Navigator retires or leaves the business, and a Stabiliser takes control. The Stabiliser drives Creators out of the firm by only accepting incremental change. Translators leave when they realise they have nothing left to do.

Participants included St. James’s Place, Ocado and HSBC amongst others.

August’s meeting will focus on how corporate chameleons get ahead. Please contact us for more information and to join.

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