Leadership & Business

The Emerging Role of the New CIO

Search Amazon.com on the word “innovation” and more than 180,000 books come back. Search Time magazine and you get nearly 3,000 results. There’s no doubt innovation is a hot topic. Other evidence comes in the form of the many surveys that have been done by IBM, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc. In one survey by Boston Consulting Group, 81% of CEOs listed innovation as one of their top three priorities.

So what’s being done about it? How are CEOs satisfying the demand they’ve created by jumping on the innovation band wagon and telling their boards and CEOs that they’re focused on innovation? They’re doing what they’ve always done. They’re delegating. How do I know? Just look at the number of companies that have created the new position of CIO (Chief Innovation Officer) in recent years. It’s a trend that’s all too familiar. Back in the 70s and 80s it was the CFO—a response to the increasing financial complexity of business. In the 90s it was the first generation of CIO (the Chief Information Officers) followed by the CTO (Chief Technology Officer). Five years ago, in response to the Enron debacle, it was the CRO (Chief Risk Officer)—and in some cases, another CEO (Chief Ethics Officer). Well, today it’s the Chief Innovation Officer.

So what does a Chief Innovation Officer do? That’s a great question. In a BusinessWeek book review this week, Michael Arndt, without realizing it, alludes to the problem that most CIOs don’t know what to do—at least not yet. He comments on a new book from the Harvard Business School Press by two BCG consultants. The books is titled, Payback, by James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirken, Arndt points out, all too well, that what the book lacks are the “how-to” instructions needed to successfully build innovation into a business plan. Once again we have high-level fluff. The gist of the book—you need to ensure your innovation efforts are profitable—is just too simplistic and is simply a restatement of countless books of yesteryear put in the context of innovation instead of re-engineering, mergers and acquisitions, or any other “new” effort to improve business. Which business improvement efforts don’t require a measurable payback?

I run into a lot of CIOs these days. They don’t all explicitly have that title—they might be VPs of R&D, SVPs of Corporate Strategy, or Directors of Sales, Marketing and Innovation—but they all have the same objectives. They’ve been tasked—delegated to by their CEO—with figuring out how to drive innovation in their company. After all, the CEOs must keep their promises to their board and shareholders. Most of them are doing a lot of reading, attending conferences, and possibly reading an occasional blog. And most of them are as confused and lost as ever, because of books like Payback.

That’s why I’ve set out to help them, by creating a program that actually teaches them how to do their job. We start with simple things, like writing a job description for themselves. And then we set to the task of actually teaching them how to execute on each element of that job description.

It’s a pretty simple concept, but one that seems long overdue.

TRIZ Continues to Take Root

Last week I was interviewed by Innovation Tools’ Chuck Frey about INsourcing Innovation, and how TRIZ can be used to provide structure and direction to a company’s innovation initiatives.

If you’re interested in reading the full interview, you can find it here

Talking About Ambidextrous Organizations

Earlier this month, Dan Keldsen of The Delphi Group and I set aside some time to talk about INsourcing Innovation, and the performance excellence tools a company can use to become a really outstanding organization.

Feel free to listen in here.

Innovation, yes! But How?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Business books I pick up in the airport, all the mainstream magazines (Fast Company, Fortune, Industry Week, etc.), trade publications – and yes, even blogs. And there’s one theme I’ve been reading about with increasing frequency – innovation.

Then there’s the enormous number of companies that have something in their taglines that point to innovation, either directly or indirectly (look at GE, Motorola, Siemens and so many others).

So here’s what’s troubling me: no one talks about “how” to innovate. Sure, they talk about how important it is. They talk about how it is driving their business strategy. They talk about changing business dynamics, providing more value, beating the competition and so on. But no one is talking about HOW to innovate.

The overwhelming majority of innovation consultants are tilted toward helping companies with the softer side of culture building. But it’s the harder side that challenges companies, perhaps more so. It’s the real product and service barriers – the “technical barriers” – that stand so prominently in the way of true market-changing breakthrough.

Creativity + structure = innovation success
Gone are the days of neon colored walls and pinball machines in the cafeteria, all designed to foster a more “creative” environment. Seems to me that these programs just created new ways to spend investors’ money. Today we need reliable, predictable and replicable approaches to innovation – not loosy goosy ones.

This demands a new approach—or at least an approach that’s new to most of us. To be reliable, predictable and scaleable (another word for replicable), we need to follow the same rules we follow for everything else expected to exhibit success. Basically we need a process and a methodology for innovation.

In a recent edition of Business Week Online, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said “I look at Six Sigma as a foundation on which you can build more innovation.” Right on, I say. We need more structure to innovation, without sacrificing the necessary soft side – just like Six Sigma brought structure to quality improvement in the same way.

Immelt would agree that Six Sigma works best when it’s deployed through a structure and under conditions that build improvement culture along with improvement skills.  It appears he’s also saying that Six Sigma is a great stepping stone or springboard for Structured Innovation.

Innovation is for all to learn and do
I recently completed a book entitled Insourcing Innovation. I wrote it with some colleagues because the achievement of continuous innovation is dependent upon certain “critical Xs,” as we say in the Six Sigma world. It’s not enough to state the goal (innovation). You have to define the chain of causation that enables you to achieve your goal.