Hiring A Chief Innovation Officer Is A Bad Idea
Coming to the realization that you can’t delegate innovation.
You’ll have almost no chance to really innovate—and here’s why.
Recently, Harvard Business Review published an article titled What Kind of Chief Innovation Officer Does Your Company Need? In it, the authors describe the growing demand for such an executive-level role and discuss ideas on how to consider it relative to your organization’s own needs.
Sounds all well and good, right? Not really. And here’s why: You can’t delegate innovation.
Innovation is a mindset—not a job title or a seat in the C-suite. To really work, innovation must be part of an organization’s cultural fabric, and everyone has to buy in. It is much more than something you do; it is the way that your company thinks.
So when you hire a so-called chief innovation officer, you virtually relieve everyone else of the responsibility and accountability for making innovation happen. Rather than elevating—and expecting—the entire organization to pursue breakthrough ideas, you establish an environment that allows people to opt out or become conscientious objectors to change.
Innovation is hard
Nowadays, innovation is little more than a buzzword for doing something new. But new is easy. Innovation, on the other hand, is hard. It’s about solving problems and creating real value. And that requires breakthrough ideas and a deep, no-holds-barred commitment to pursuing them.
Innovation inherently means change. It means breaking the rules. It means busting norms. And, perhaps hardest of all, it means risking failure.
Yet, by and large, people don’t like those things. Most not only resist them, but also learn to avoid them at almost any cost. Still, the kind of dramatic culture change that innovation needs is only possible if it starts at the top, and everyone on the team owns a part of it.
The buck stops here
Sure, companies put someone in charge of sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, and R&D. But those are management functions. And, fundamentally, innovation is about leadership.
So, hypothetically, if there is a head of innovation, it should be the person who, at the end of the day, is responsible for the success or failure of the entire enterprise. It should be the person who has everything to lose if innovation doesn’t happen—a president, a CEO, or a chairman. Not a chief innovation officer.
They needn’t produce all the ideas on their own. Nor should they. But they are the only one that can sanction the necessary risks that are required for real innovation.
Go big or go home
While people generally like the idea of innovation, they have a change of heart when they realize that you’re talking about them and how they do their “real work.” So the primary barrier to innovation is not coming up with ideas; it is convincing people to fully commit themselves to those ideas and see them through.
But innovation, by its very nature, calls for actions and behaviors that run counter to how most organizations are structured. It calls for a culture of risk-taking where people are expected to go all in and really embrace change, uncertainty, and the upside of failure. It calls for sacrificing predictability for possibility. And it calls for knowing that if nothing ever fails, then you haven’t pushed ideas far enough.
Getting started
No one willingly chooses to fail. And that begs the question, how do you get people to pursue new ideas knowing full well that they might not be possible? Start by focusing them on three factors.
Inevitability. Innovation will happen with or without you. So you are far better off to seize the opportunity and get in the game rather than be left behind.
Opportunity. Accept the fact that no matter what you do today, it can almost certainly be done better tomorrow. Once you free yourself of that constraint, anything and everything is possible.
Necessity. Eliminate your backup plan. In giving yourself no other alternative, you’ll force your hand in the best sense of the term.
Today, innovation is arguably the secret sauce to business success. So don’t delegate it to a chief innovation officer—and put your entire company in a position to really innovate.