Who Should You Hire to Lead Your Innovation Effort?

One of the key questions one needs to resolve at the commencement of an innovation programme is what sort of innovator you should hire to lead everything.

This is particularly important, because whether you are running a central innovation team with a participative agenda, or a distributed innovation function with a mandate to shepherd an innovation culture, everything that happens will likely devolve from the particular mentality the innovation leader brings to the table.

One option is to put an entrepreneur in charge: an individual with proven capacity to being small ventures and run them to success. The kind of person who knows everything necessary to run an enterprise on a shoestring and can match limited resources to big problems. This is a leader who has proved they have what it takes to turn individual ideas into something valuable.

Alternatively, is it better to hire someone with significant experience managing portfolios of activity, and who know just how to make decisions to start things as well as how to stop them. Now, such an individual probably doesn't have a great deal of experience in the low down day to day running of projects, but they certainly are able to make investment decisions.

Most people, given the choice would go for the former. It is the easy choice to make: choose someone you know will at least make a few things they choose to focus on succeed.

Regrettably, the obvious choice is not always the best one.

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 innovation teams in larger organisations, however, this is a very bad strategy. Innovation leaders usually last about 18 months before their stakeholders get sick of waiting for results. Doing things in the sequential order of the entrepreneur means that that time runs out way before there are decent result. The implication is that hiring an investor 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.

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