Don’t Hire a Chief Innovation Officer

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Innovation   Strategy  

Among my innovation peers, we have talked about how crucial executive commitment is, and some organizations have responded by hiring Innovation Managers, Innovation Directors, VPs of Innovation and Chief Innovation Officers (CINOs, not CIO’s, so there is no confusion with Chief Information Officers).

One of the dangers of putting people in charge of innovation though is that unless you carefully craft the positions and communicate their place and purpose across the organization, you can leave people feeling that innovation is not their job.

But the reality is that everyone has a role to play in innovation. In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, I outlined nine innovation roles that must be filled at the appropriate times for innovation to be successful:

1. Revolutionary
2. Artist
3. Conscript
4. Connector
5. Troubleshooter
6. Customer Champion
7. Judge
8. Magic Maker
9. Evangelist

It is because everyone has a role to play in innovation--and because everyone is innovative in their own way--that installing a Chief Innovation Officer may not be the best idea.

Any time you put someone in charge of something at that level of the organization, you end up with someone who thinks they are in charge of the area, in control of innovation. And innovation is not something that you should seek to control, but instead to facilitate.

The idea that people are either …

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