Innovation Competency

Jeffrey Phillips outlines a sound approach to the age-old question, who owns innovation?  Where does it sit on the organizational chart:

There's not a wrong way to organize, but there are benefits to developing a central team to ensure consistent methodology, language and culture and the use of consistent tools and frameworks. Eventually, most ideas if adopted will be implemented in a specific business unit or product team, so the central team acts as a facilitator, coach and sponsor, usually without implementing the ideas.

There is support for this view.  IBM asked 765 CEO's this question in their 2006 Global CEO Survey, and reported the following on the question of who has responsibility for innovation leadership:  the CEO - 27%, No Owner - 27%, Functional Managers - 24%, and Division Managers - 14%.

The wide range of responses tells me there is no consensus.  But the question still makes me a little nervous.  Why does someone have to "own" innovation?  Do we think about leadership the same way?  Does someone own leadership in a company?  No one asks that question.

I get hopeful when I see that 27% of CEO's ascribe no owner to innovation.  My sense is that creating an innovation champion or assigning it to one department could shut down others from innovating.  With strong, central ownership of innovation, others might be reluctant to initiate anything that looks like a competing approach.  When I see a company with an innovation champion (think "owner"), I expect to find innovation subversives, too.

The question is not who owns innovation, but rather who owns innovation competency development.  I see more companies moving in this direction.  Some place this within a process excellence group while others move it right into a functional department such as marketing or R&D.  Still others have dedicated resources such as GE and Diageo, two members of the MSI Innovation Roundtable.

Build innovation competency and the question of who owns innovation becomes moot.

Comments

[James Todhunter]

Ownership of innovation is very important. There is a single owner that must take responsibility for innovation. This person must have responsibility for setting and achieving corporate goals. This person must imprint the corporate culture with the value building importance of innovation. This person must allocate the resources to support innovation and build innovation competence as a sustainable driver of corporate value. This person is the CEO. The CEO can always elect to delegate authority to drive innovation, but woe unto the CEO that chooses to delegate responsibility.

[Drew]

Jim, I like your position on this. Perhaps I need to clarify better between: who owns "innova...TION" versus who owns "innova...TING." Big difference in my mind. Too often, I see where the innovation owner/champion also gets the "innova...TING" role (and the resources that go with it) to the exclusion of the rest of the organization. This is dysfunctional. Others shy away from innovation initiatives and opportunities (such as Goldfire, TRIZ, and SIT) for fear of rocking the boat.

In the ideal, I agree the CEO should own innovation. That is a model of success. There is an excellent paper from the Marketing Science Institute (www.msi.org) on this titled, "How Much Do CEOs Matter to Innovation?" You should be able to order it directly from MSI. If not, let me know and I will get one for you.

Thanks for insight, Jim.