Innovation Leaders - a new profession?
According to the National Innovation Initiative Report ("Innovate America", Dec 2004) "the transformative development in modern work is the growth of distributed, robust organisations consisting of highly flexible groups that operate collaboratively across distance and time". This is leading to the emergence of a new kind of "Innovation Professional(s)" who are responsible for leading innovation.
Innovation Leaders must possess entrepreneurial personalities, provide collaborative leadership to bring diverse parties to the table to identify common ground and initiate action. More often than not Innovation leaders operate with no formal power only their credibility. This creates challenges by trying to organise and manage an extended process where traditional operating levers of power and control may no longer be relevant. The move away from traditional command and control leadership structures means that leaders are now expected to be facilitators, stewards, coaches, designers and mentors.
Such a skill set may include providing leadership "with a light touch" co-ordination, collaboration, information and communication, project management skills, spotting skill gaps and packaging together different expertise, creativity, cultural awareness, comfortable with ambiguity, flexibility, strong communication skills, creative ideas generation and problem solving. Neil I've suggested this order for this line as one of the generic techniques in creative problem solving is to generate ideas about effects then refine, then generate ideas around causes with gay abandon then refine, then generate ideas around solutions and refine and finally generate ideas around the detail and implementation of solutions and then do the final refine (Brainstorm, analysis and solution cycles)
Consequently Innovation Leaders need a new skill set in order to be able to provide leadership and motivation to a multi discipline group of people working for different employers from different backgrounds, working in different locations.