Think Like A Chief Innovation Officer And Get W...
There are no shortcuts to strengthening creative problem-solving skills. But I have noticed some common traits among people who are innovation leaders in their organizations. So if you want to expand your ability to think imaginatively, these are the traits to develop:
Think Like a Chief Innovation Officer and Get W...
How to practice: Some people are naturally optimistic. But I do not think you need to adopt an always-sunny attitude to have hope for the future. Cultivate optimistic realism by looking at a situation from all sides. Think about what could go wrong, what is likely to go right, and how you will respond if the unexpected happens.
In the meantime, with the velocity of innovation and disruption increasing as data and technology become more widely leveraged in business, a solid relationship between the chief information officer and chief innovation officer is critical, says Patrick Sells, chief innovation officer at digital bank Quontic.
Although chief innovation officers have been around for several years, the role has increased in visibility as enterprises have embarked on digital transformation initiatives, which often include CIOs working in tandem with, well, CIOs.
Fonstad sees the role of chief innovation officer as twofold: first, ensuring that teams have the resources to engage in new ways of innovating by having access to customer data as well as processes, products and services. Their second role is to coordinate the portfolio of innovation efforts a company invests in, he says.
A chief innovation officer is responsible for continuously assessing current business processes and resources to discover and realize opportunities for growth, while the chief information officer makes sure that in the pursuit of growth, an organization is making the right technological infrastructure investments, Singh believes.
Recognizing that digital transformation has fundamentally changed how businesses can create value and what skills and tasks are needed to support that strategy, she says, Deloitte designated the role of chief innovation officer, which Henry transitioned into nearly a year ago.
Healthcare systems are also recognizing the importance of having chief innovation officers. Dr. Richard Milani, chief clinical transformation officer at Ochsner Health System, the largest nonprofit healthcare system and private employer in Louisiana, was involved in the creation in 2015 of innovationOchsner (iO), an innovation lab tasked with developing solutions for the most pressing problems in healthcare.Milani, who also has an IT background, was asked to assume the role of chief medical information officer when Ochsner began using an electronic medical record system in 2014. The CMIO role was the prelude to his current role as an innovator and Milani is tasked with helping prepare the health system for the future.
By virtue of the title, chief innovation officers tend to have a future-focused vision to help an organization realize its strategic objectives by thinking radically about its mission and people and how to change processes to improve business performance.
Often, chief innovation officers report to the CEO. How the CEO and the rest of the C-suite view the role of the CIO versus the chief innovation officer will usually determine who owns digital initiatives.
Typically, the chief information officer plays a much more specific role with regard to the digital resources the innovation teams draw on, specifically, around access to data and developer talent, says Fonstad.
COOLEY: I'm fortunate because I had the buy-in of my management. I work directly for the city manager and the deputy city manager. They have both fully supported the innovation process, and that started with reassigning me with the title of chief innovation officer toward the end of 2019. My mayor calls the city the Innovation Lab, and he has given us the latitude to conduct pilots.
The CInOs at Cloud Pharmaceuticals and PureTech Health both are core members of the senior executive leadership teams. At J&J, the reporting lines are still being defined, but Hait is likely to continue reporting directly to the CSO and to have direct relationships with others on the senior executive committee. These direct relationships enable them to make timely contributions to the direction of the company that both bolster and focus innovation.
I think one important distinction is that areas like HR, Finance, IT, R&D, and Design are both functions and activities. Innovation, on the other hand, is certainly a business-wide activity, but it is not a function.
Assemble is a next-gen compensation platform that empowers teams to make better compensation decisions. We help forward-thinking companies like ServiceTitan and Verkada attract and retain talent with fair, equitable, and transparent pay. Our platform helps teams manage compensation end-to-end, from defining a compensation program (philosophy, job architecture, comp bands), to making and communicating decisions for new hires and employees. With Assemble, companies can give decision makers self-serve access to information and workflows including conducting compensation review cycles, monitoring pay equity, compliance with pay transparency laws, and more.
And innovation in legal requires unlikely sources to inspire lawyers. Now that I have learned about the process of innovation from some of the leaders in the field at Wharton, I see inspiration everywhere. What if litigants in a courthouse saw a screen that listed the estimated start time and location of their matters like an airport arrivals and departures window? What if a new class of paraprofessionals could provide legal service for lower-complexity matters? What if the profession could serve more people, like in the healthcare industry? What if legal became more like the field of psychology, expanding access to counseling through virtual consultations and third-party funders? I mean, the sky really is the limit, and it takes so little to get the creative juices flowing.
We believe the roundtable findings illuminate the CIO position by revealing key tensions and even pitfalls that the CIOs are likely to face. We came into the roundtable having a sense that the CIO position was about having a strategic impact through enhancing innovation-related activities. While this is of course true, roundtable discussions and our subsequent analysis revealed several tensions associated with the position. Two stand out as key examples:
In December, Kirby Brady, a 2009 Masters of Planning alumna, was named the first chief innovation officer of San Diego. With this appointment, Brady joins only a few other women of color who hold the same position in similar major cities.
Training and Education. This means training the entire workforce in new practices, in emerging trends, and how to think like an innovator. Not only should the Chief Innovation Officer socialize the new patient data best practices that are being used in or outside of the organization, but they should be asking others to do the same so that there is collaboration in the learning process.
About 20 years ago, the title of chief innovation officer did not exist in the corporate world. Today, a chief innovation officer is vital to most businesses. If you look on LinkedIn, you will see more than 400,000 individuals bearing that title.
Most chief innovation officers used to be the company's chief information officers, who manage information, data and information technology-related systems. But the business landscape shifted its focus to innovation. As a result, companies need an executive who can help build a culture of innovation and create a competitive edge by developing new products or services through innovation.
One of the key ideas highlighted today is making your business resilient. As enterprises move forward in a post-pandemic period, organizational resiliency will be among the main goals, and innovation will be at the heart of becoming resilient. Chief innovation officers will help companies develop the ability to rapidly respond to unexpected events and the associated shift in customer needs. The key here is how to make your products and services flexible to cope with significant business disruptions.
Most people think that developing innovative ideas is solely the role of the chief innovation officer. But this is not true. Chief innovation officers do not have a monopoly of knowledge when it comes to new ideas. In most instances, the role of chief innovation officers is to cultivate a company culture that allows other people within the organization to develop new ideas. They do that by training people to become innovative and helping create a work environment that encourages individuals to contribute new ideas for the company's benefit. Chief innovation officers can further champion an idea raised by an employee.
Nowadays, companies cannot be too passive with innovation. The business landscape is rapidly changing, and customer needs are also evolving at a quick pace; therefore, a chief innovation officer should always be vigilant in responding to these changes and be the beacon of new ideas and critical thinking.
The first is curiosity. In the context of innovation, being more curious or in touch deeply with your customers will spark more insight and build more empathy. The more you apply curious thinking such as exploration, investigation and learning, the more likely you will generate innovative solutions that your customers want, need and can afford.
The second quality is championing divergent and convergent thinking simultaneously. Innovative ideas may come from all directions, and so it is important to cultivate diverse points of view to encourage novel thinking in parallel with critical thinking. Just because you have a big idea does not necessarily mean it will be a commercially successful idea. Chief innovation officers play a pivotal role in encouraging a balance between divergent and convergent thinking.
The third key trait is collaboration. Seldom do big ideas come from a lone genius. To ensure that good ideas become the next generation of new products and services, a chief innovation officer must collaborate with all levels of the organization. 041b061a72