Who Should you Hire to Lead Innovation

By James A Gardner

A key question to be resolved at the start of an innovation effort is who to hire to lead.

This is an especially important decision, because whether you've determined to have a central innovation team or a distributed one that builds an innovation culture, everything that happens will be dependent on what mentality the leader brings to the table.

One option is to put an entrepreneur in charge: an individual with proven capacity to being small ventures and run them to success. The kind of person who knows everything necessary to run an enterprise on a shoestring and can match limited resources to big problems. This is a leader who has proved they have what it takes to turn individual ideas into something valuable.

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.

Most people, given the choice would go for the former. It is the easy choice to make: choose someone you know will at least make a few things they choose to focus on succeed.

Unfortunately, this is not always the best choice.

Entrepreneurial innovation leaders will always be highly motivated to make a few pet projects successful. That is how they've made a name for themselves in the first place, generally. They've taken a good idea, and through personal heroics, made it into something worthwhile. Usually, their whole careers have been made on a few lucky breaks.

Individual heroics are one thing, but the fact of the matter is most innovation projects fail for one reason or other. This happens despite the amount of effort applied. Entrepreneurs accept this intuitively, so they cancel a projects which don't seem to be progressing well. They live in the hope that their next project will be a hit.

For innovators in corporate situations, though, this is a very bad strategy. Innovation teams usually last about 18 months before they are disbanded, so doing things in a sequential order means time runs out way before there are decent results. The implication is that hiring someone with an investment mentality, rather than an entrepreneur, is usually sensible.

Investors have an intuitive understanding of the fact that the real name of the game in innovation is avoiding concentrations of risk to get to a predictable return. Usually, that means a light touch on a large number of simultaneous innovations, rather than a deep concentration on a few. - 32171

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