What is a Chief Innovation Officer?
Managing the Process of Change and Innovation
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What is a Chief Innovation Officer?
To answer this question, we should first look at what the word “innovation” even means. The wikipedia definition reads, “Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.” In other words, innovation is about more than just having great ideas, it’s also about execution.
Businesses today can no longer afford to be passive about innovation. As it’s often said in business literature, "if you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will.” It falls on the shoulders of Chief Innovation offices to spearhead this disruption from within.
A Chief Innovation Officer, often abbreviated as CINO, is the executive responsible for managing innovation within an organization. At some organizations, CINOs are responsible for coming up with new ideas on their own. At others, they are responsible for assessing employees' ideas, selecting the best ones, and overseeing their implementation.
In these cases, the CINO may also be in charge of developing educational programs, training and other initiatives to promote innovation throughout the workforce. It may also be up to them to promote change and secure leadership buy-in for new projects.
At many companies, the CINO is primarily focused on developing new, digital products and services. However, this isn’t always the case. A CINO at a pharmaceutical company may be responsible for driving innovation within the R&D department to help them develop the next blockbuster drug. A CINO at a toy manufacturer might be responsible for traditional and digital product development. It all depends on the nature of the industry.
To summarize, the CINOs are typically responsible for:
- Developing long-term, growth-oriented innovation strategies
- Creating an innovation portfolio
- Securing stakeholder and leadership buy-in
- Establishing a innovation pipeline or roadmap that outlines end-to-end innovation processes, from generation of ideas to cultivation to delivering business value
- Overseeing new innovations as they are introduced to the marketpla
- Evaluation of risk versus reward for innovation
- Building L&D programs for employees
- Promoting an inclusive, collaborative culture of innovation across the enterprise
- Analyzing competition and maintaining an overall competitive-edge
- Building change management programs
What’s the difference between a CINO and a CIO?
Chief information Officers (CIOs) are responsible for the management, implementation, and usability of information and computer technologies. While CIOs are experts in information technology, CINOs are experts in how technology can be used to create something new.
One of the benefits of having a CINO is that it reduces the burden on CIOs who, with everything on their plate, may note have the bandwidth to brainstorm or work with business units to launch new products, services, etc. While the CIO is responsible for an organization’s enterprise IT strategy, the CINO is solely focused on facilitating innovation.
Does your organization need a CINO?
That depends. Some argue that having a CINO actually decreases innovation. In an article published by Forbes titled “Hiring A Chief Innovation Officer Is A Bad Idea,” author Chuck Swoboda explains, “When you hire a so-called chief innovation officer, you virtually relieve everyone else of the responsibility and accountability for making innovation happen. Rather than elevating—and expecting—the entire organization to pursue breakthrough ideas, you establish an environment that allows people to opt-out or become conscientious objectors to change.”
In some environments, this may very well be true. However, it can’t be denied that over ⅓ of fortune 500 companies currently have a CINO and that percentage is rapidly growing. As of January 2021, there were over 1.6K job listings for CINOs on LinkedIn from organizations ranging from government agencies to major tech companies. This suggests that the CINO is more than just a passing fad.
