Innovation Leaders (PDF)

Innovation leaders promote and address the innovation agenda in
their company. Through personal conviction or competitive necessity
they are obsessed with providing superior value to customers
through innovation. They know how to mobilize their staff behind
concrete innovation initiatives and do not hesitate to personally
coach innovation teams.

For innovation to occur leadership has to be collective. To
create a momentum for innovation in their company, leaders from
different functions need to team up, to build innovation networks.
Innovation leadership is not just an innate talent that can be
selected at the hiring level. It can be developed within an
appropriate company culture through careful leadership development,
typically achieved through career management and coaching.
Innovation leaders also need to stay on board and it is the
responsibility of the top management team to create an attractive
climate to develop and keep its innovation leaders.

There are plenty of books that deal with innovation, or with new
product development, or with leadership; this is different in its
focus on the specifics of innovation leadership - that
particular form of leadership that stimulates and sustains
innovation.

This book maps the broad territory of innovation leadership and
contributes new thinking on the focus of the emerging leadership
role of the CTO; distinction between 'front end' and
'back end' innovation leaders; the concept of aligning
leadership styles with strategy; and the chain of leadership
concept.

Combining practice-based and empirical research-based
observations with simple conceptual frameworks, illustrated by many
company examples and case stories from a broad range of industries
in the US and Europe, this is a systematic presentation of
innovation drivers and their implications in terms of what leaders
need to do to make it work.