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March 10, 2010The main question that needs resolving at the start of an innovation programme is what kind of innovator you’re going to hire to lead your programme.
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.
Should you put an entrepreneur in charge, someone with proven capability to start and run small ventures? The kind of person that knows everything about working on a shoestring and matching limited resources to big problems? A leader, in other words, with proof they can turn an idea into something that works?
On the other hand, is it a better choice to get someone who has experience managing portfolios of activity? Such an individual knows how to make decisions to start things, but also can shut them down. They may not have a great deal of project management experience, but they certainly know how to optimise overall returns.
Generally, given the choice, most people would hire the former. Its an easy choice to make: select someone who you know will at least make a few things they concentrate on succeed.
Unfortunately, this is not always the best choice.
Innovation leaders who are entrepreneurial will be highly motivated to make their pet projects successful no matter the cost. This, after all, is the way they got to be leaders in the first place. They take good ideas and through personal heroics, make them into something worthwhile. Often, their whole careers have been based on a few lucky successes.
Individual heroics are all very well, but most things innovators try will not work no matter how much effort it put in. The entrepreneur accepts this, and calls it quits at an appropriate moment so they can start working on their next big thing. They live in the hope that this time they will have a big success.
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.
Is this the year you commence planning an innovation program and are thinking about your hiring decisions? James Gardner’s free online resource has genuine advice on how to recruit an innovation leader.
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