Leadership and Innovation: Learning from the Best

In surveys of most innovative companies, rms like Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Virgin regularly top the ranks, and stories of their emblematic leaders are recurring topics for management books and magazines. But what do Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson have in common? What do they do that steers innovation in their companies? Are they the sole drivers of innovation leadership? And is there a direct link between the innovation capability of a rm and the charisma of its leader? After all, companies such as Toyota, 3M, Samsung, and Logitech are also recognized for their innovation capabilities, even though it would be more difcult to put a face on their innovation leadership. Learning from the experience of some of the most innovative companies, we describe the common traits that characterize innovation leaders but also show the multiple facets of innovation leadership. Innovation leadership involves different roles and abilities across organization levels and strategic orientations, and along the organization and innovation life cycle. Overall, innovation leadership is too diverse to be left to single individuals; it must be embedded in the organization. 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Innovation can be dened as marketable invention: the act of generating an idea and transforming it into a new product, service, solution, or business model that can be sold to customers. Managing innovation involves developing a vision and a strategy, setting up the processes that will materialize it, and creating the organizational conditions and culture that will facilitate the emergence of ideas and their implementation. Creativity, innovation strategies, development processes, knowledge

ROLAND BEL

management, and learning organizations, as well as innovative cultures, have long been topics for management books and academic literature on innovation. But to some extent leadership behavior has been identied by many researchers and practitioners as one of the most, if not the most, important driver of innovation.1 Innovation leaderships role is about inspirationgenerating ideas, a vision, and a strategyand designbuilding an organizational structure and a exible culture as well as the speedy processes that support them (see Exhibit 1). And without great innovation leaders, there is no innovation. What would Apple be without Steve Jobs? Microsoft without Bill Gates? Dell without Michael Dell? Google without Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Or Virgin without Richard Branson? What Is an Innovation Leader? The process of innovation is commonly viewed as being organized in two key steps: idea generation and conceptualization (the front end) and product development and launch (the back end). The rst phase is full of uncertainty and requires creativity and vision. The second phase requires discipline and efciency, and, very often, time is of the essence. These two steps obviously require different kinds of leadership but are inseparable and complementary in determining the success of the new venture. A front-end leader who does not consider the concrete implications of its technologys choice for the feasibility of the new product is likely to end up with major issues at the implementation stage. A backend leader who loses sight of the strategic vision and objectives of the new product is likely to end up with a market failure (e.g., a me too product). A good innovation leader is characterized by the ability to excel on the apparently conicting skills

c 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) Global Business and Organizational Excellence DOI: 10.1002/joe.20308 January/February 2010

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Exhibit 1. Innovation Leadership: The Driving Force

Innovation leadership

Idea, vision, strategy

Processes

Organizational structure and culture

of creativity and discipline. Innovation leaders have a strong ability to recognize opportunities and to develop them. A Common Prole for Innovation Leaders Successful innovation leaders are characterized by a set of common attributes, identical skills and abilities, and a combination of breadth and depth, which makes them generalists and specialists at the same time. Jean-Philippe Deschamps, a long-time innovation management practitioner and consultant, gathers from many discussions with top innovation leaders and senior executives that innovation leaders share the attributes described in the next six subsections.2
A Mix of Emotion and Realism

day. After creativity comes the time for discipline and implementation.
The Acceptance of Uncertainty, Risks, and Failures

This is the unusual combination of creativity (to foster the emergence of ideas and concepts) and discipline (to lead the process of development and market launching). Deschamps reports the opinion of Ad Huijser, a former member of Philips Group management and CEO of Philips Research: You always need creativity in innovation, so [. . .] innovation leaders [. . .] are creative, but in a balanced way. They are not creative every day with a new idea because you cannot lead an organization towards innovation if you change the direction every

By nature, innovation involves risks and uncertainty. A good innovation leader is not so much the one who knows the key success factors but the one who handles risks successfully. And guiding an organization for innovation implies accepting this uncertainty but also learning from failures (see Exhibit 2). William McKnight, founder and former president and chairman of the board of 3M, used to say, Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And its essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.3 The well-known story of 3Ms Post-it notes is a good illustration of how an initial failure (microsphere adhesive, a nonsticking glue) can turn into a huge commercial success.
Exhibit 2. Innovation, Risks, and Failures
Risks/ Uncertainties Errors/ Failures

Innovation

Initiatives

Learning

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Leaders in innovation do not stigmatize failure but tolerate it and learn from it. They encourage their staff to take risk and learn from their failures. Steve Jobs and his team of innovators provide multiple examples. The Macintosh was born from Lisa, an earlier product that opped; the iPhone was the response to the failure of Apples original music phone (developed with Motorola), and its recent computers are using technology from NeXT, a company Steve Jobs founded in the 1980s that almost failed and was later acquired by Apple.
A High Degree of Passion

proprietary ingredients and was designed to work with iTunes software, which was also brought in. Good innovation leaders know how to mix their own ideas with outside technologies and then add their own twists. Mike Ramsay, cofounder and former CEO and chairman of TiVo (the revolutionary view-on-demand TV company) inserted two fundamental principles in the companys charter: (1) not to reinvent the wheel and to do things internally only if it adds value, and (2) to partner and cooperate openly with the best partners available.4

Have you ever attended a new product presentation by Steve Jobs? It is not a new product presentation; it is a show. Steve Jobs has a passion for computers and computer design. When speaking about it, he always uses words such as amazing, awesome, cool, or extraordinary. Showing passion and enthusiasm for new products or features also generates passion for people around him, so passion, like blood, circulates into the veins of Apples organization and shapes its culture.
The Willingness to Proactively Search for External Technologies and Ideas

Thousands of ideas lead to hundreds of concepts that generate tens of projects that give few market successes.

The Courage to Stop Projects, Not Just to Start Them

Curiosity and the willingness to use what has been discovered elsewhere are key attributes of todays innovation leader. The development of the knowledge economy has seen the spread of knowledge worldwide, and the time is gone when Bell Laboratories was locking its engineers away to come up with new ideas and was basing its new products on their inspiration. Now is the time of open innovation or network innovation, and the notinvented-here syndrome is pushed out of every laboratory. Pharmaceutical companies spend a third of their research and development (R&D) budgets on externally sourced technologies and research partnerships. A company like Apple, once viewed as an intrinsic innovator, is in fact leveraging extensively on external technology: the iPod concept was originally brought in by an external consultant. It used off-the-shelf components combined with

Thousands of ideas lead to hundreds of concepts that generate tens of projects that give few market successes. As a project moves from the initial idea to the next phases, cumulative investment grows, and wise companies have set up stage-gate funnel innovation processes to select the projects most likely to succeed. The most difcult decision to make for an innovation leader is to stop a project. There are always good reasons not to kill a project: it meets net present value (NPV) or return on investment (ROI) goals, an important customer wants it, the CEO wants it, its Francks project, it might be the project that saves my bacon, good managers can meet stretched goals (and Im a good manager), and so on.5 Great innovation leaders know that they have to sacrice projects more likely to fail as early as possible, so as to focus efforts and resources on the most likely winners. Ad Huijser, former research star at Philips, gives the following comment: Leadership is pulling the plug. . . .This is, of course, only one part of leadership; the other one is starting things! But starting is easier than stopping in a research environment. Stopping is what really asks for making choices, and that means taking a risk

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because you may be stopping something of value. Therefore, stopping projects asks for more leadership than starting projects. . . . A creative environment, for me, is an atmosphere in which creativity can ourish, but at the same time it is constrained by budgets, by manpower, etc. So, if you want to create new things, you have to stop other things.6
A Talent for Attracting Innovators and Building and Steering Winning Teams

Innovation leaders recognize that innovation is a team effort because it requires a number of various capabilities to make it happen. Daniel Borel, chairman of the board at Logitech, mentions that the great leader is one who is able [. . .] to build a team with people who have a different psyche of one versus the other, get them to work together, share the same language for the sake of the customer.7

An effective innovation leader ensures that the organization will secure its desired outcomes by creating win-win systems that reward the right behaviors and performance.

In addition to those attributes, innovation leaders share the following common traits:

r Will and humility. Despite commitment, resources, structure, and processes, there is still a role for serendipity in innovation, and innovation leaders understand that focus on innovation does not guarantee success. They are also aware that past successes are not a recipe for future accomplishment. A usual way to deliver innovative solutions on a sustainable basis is to constantly ght against arrogance (we know better) and against complacence (business as usual, why bother?). After a ve-year study in eleven great companies, Jim Collins8 discovered that these companies had in common what he called Level 5 leadersCEOs who showed humility and will

at the same time. Collins cites Darwin E. Smith (former CEO of Kimberly-Clark), Colman M. Mockler (former CEO of Gillette), and Charles Cork Walgreen III (former CEO of Walgreens) as examples of leaders who produced great results by showing an unwavering resolverelentlessly sticking to their objectiveswhile putting the company rst, showing ambition not for themselves but for their company. These are not the kind of CEOs appearing regularly on TV talk shows or on the covers of magazines. Moreover, these Level 5 leaders also have the talent to choose their successor and leave behind them a company that would be great without them. r Skills and abilities. For successful innovation leaders, the above characteristics are complemented by a group of common capabilities. Empirical studies have shown that six sets of leadership skills and abilities positively inuence organizations success rates in implementing change and driving innovation.9 r Ability to coach: this involves inspiring others to be at their best and remaining futureoriented, establishing a collegial partnership with employees and serving employees in implementing change and innovation activities. r Ability to reward: the things that get rewarded get done. An effective innovation leader ensures that the organization will secure its desired outcomes by creating win-win systems that reward the right behaviors and performance. But, given the nature of innovation, those rewards systems need to be exible and gradual, valuing small contributions, milestones, and incremental change (small victories). r Ability to involve and support others: connecting with employees, soliciting feedback, and offering a high level of support facilitates employees involvement and commitment, which is critical to successful innovation and change implementation. r Ability to promote teamwork and collaboration: innovation is a collective endeavor.

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Structuring workgroups to support collaboration is critical. This involves designing them so that members who have diverse background and skills can communicate, interact, and constructively challenge each others ideas. r Ability to communicate: communication is an effective tool for stimulating employees involved in innovation. The innovation leader must constantly share her vision to drive employees efforts toward the right direction. This includes giving feedbacks and reinforcement, so that employees keep the focus and sustain their motivation. r Ability to motivate: with innovation, a leaders ability to persuade and inuence others to work in a common direction is imperative. This means organizing and fostering a motivating environment (i.e., one that supports and rewards new ideas and develops job satisfaction, equity, organizational commitment, effective communication, freedom, exibility, and resources). There is no doubt that the informal, freedom-oriented environment of most Silicon Valley rms is a critical motivation factor for their employees and a key success factor of their innovation capability. Moreover, fostering a motivating environment includes the ability to attract and retain individuals who are passionate about their work and intrinsically motivated. A recent empirical study10 has shown that the abilities to communicate appropriately and to motivate others have the most signicant inuence on a leaders ability to effectively drive innovation and implement change. r Specialist and generalist. A senior Japanese innovator at NEC, once asked to dene the prole of innovative managers his company was trying to attract, used the following metaphor: We dont want potatoes, i.e. people who have a lot of breadth in terms of their functional or discipline coverage but no depth! . . . We dont favor carrots either, those specialists or experts who build a lot of depth in their chosen eld but

have no breadth, because they choose to remain in their narrow area. . . . What we are looking for are mushrooms, i.e. individuals who combine a breadth of interests and knowledge with some depth in a number of areas. These are the kind of managers to whom we entrust our critical innovation projects.11 The innovation leader must be like a mushroom: with a deep stemthat is, a strongtechnical base and a large head able to reach out to other areas in order to comprehend all aspects of the new venture. But, being humble, the innovation leader knows his/her limits. Therefore, successful innovation leaders usually let other leaders grow around them, which complements their spectrum of competencies with their own perspectives (see Exhibit 3 on page 52). Diversity fuels innovation. Jeffrey Immelt, driving the innovation efforts at GE, decided to bring innovation leaders from outside (especially in marketing) to fuel its company with new ideas, stimulate new thinking, and challenge existing paradigms. Different Types of Innovation Leadership Even though innovation leaders share common characteristics, we argue that different types of innovation leadership are required at different levels of the organization, for different strategies, at different phases of the organizations evolution, and at different stages of innovation, and depend on the characteristics of the team members.
Innovation Leadership and Organization Level

The higher in the organization, the more powerful the leader is to promote and drive innovation. Examples abound, such as Steve Jobs at Apple or Richard Branson at Virgin, where leaders at the top have inspired entire organizations. And the critical role of CEOs in directly inuencing organizational innovation12 and leading the innovation process and culture13 has been demonstrated. But innovation does not come only from the top: it can be initiated anywhere in an organization, even at the lowest

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Exhibit 3. Innovation Leader: A Mushroom

levels, and companies such as 3M have shown that bottom-up innovation can sometimes be more effective than top-down innovation. Whirlpools former CEO Dave Whitwam once characterized his companys global innovation strategy as innovation from everyone and everywhere.14 Marc Benioff, the chairman and CEO at Salesforce.com, an innovative software company, considers that the CEOs role is to lead the company to develop new modelsbusiness, technology, and leadership modelsthat will drive innovation to fuel growth and protability.15 At the highest level, the primary role of an innovation leader is to be a sponsor for innovation. This is the IDEA phase, which agglomerates the following set of attributes.

r Driving: leading the people who make innovation happen. This involves being a role model by demonstrating ones own involvement and energy. Steve Jobs at Apple is an excellent example of leading by example. r Enabling: this includes the ability to listen, understand, and show empathy for the individuals involved, as well as to show condence in their ability to perform and meet the challenges. The objective here is to enable employees to be innovative. Paul ONeills vision for Alcoa, based on quality, safety, and innovation, was supported by extensive personal contacts and his presence at regular meetings or task forces (and sometimes on video tapes), where he constantly reafrmed his encouragement to team members. r Advising: guiding and coaching the teams and organizational units that are involved in innovation. Companies such as Nokia, Johnson & Johnson, and Kimberly-Clark have established venture or advisory boards made up of the CEO and top-level managers, whose role is to pull together internal and external knowledge and advise innovation teams by evaluating

r Inspiring: articulating a vision that people can

identify with and that can generate excitement and commitment. Henry Fords a car for everyone or Bill Gatess one PC on every desk are archetypical examples of visions that are clear, challenging, meaningful, motivating, and credible.

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opportunities, guiding innovation efforts, and approving strategic investments.

A charismatic style involves communicating with vision, energizing, and accelerating innovation processes, while a strategic style consists of using power to innovate, committing employees to innovation, and enabling employees to be innovative. But with innovation, those styles have limitations and risks.
These characteristics correspond to what is generally called charismatic and strategic leadership styles.16 A charismatic style involves communicating with vision, energizing, and accelerating innovation processes, while a strategic style consists of using power to innovate, committing employees to innovation, and enabling employees to be innovative. But with innovation, those styles have limitations and risks.17 In particular, a strong charismatic leader may create unrealistic expectations, generate dependency or a reluctance to disagree, and provoke the disenfranchisement of next levels of management. Moreover, the leaders time, energy, expertise, and competencies are necessarily limited. Thus, if driving innovation from the top is necessary, it is seldom sufcient, and the solution to these problems requires a more instrumental and interactive18 style of leadership, involving more leaders in the organization. Those may be technical champions (inventors or team leaders responsible for an invention) or business champions (representing the broader market or user perspective) or technological gatekeepers (collecting information from various sources and passing it on to the relevant people). In other words, sponsors require champions, and an idea requires ARMS to be effectively implemented. Those ARMS are provided by other innovation leaders, lower in the organization, exerting the following attributes:

r Advocating: promoting and defending a vision at

a higher level. In a bottom-up innovation pro-

cess, ideas are generated by individuals down in the organization and compete for resources. They require champions to defend them and obtain the organizations commitment and an allocation of resources. In a top-down innovation process, top management will need relays in the organization to champion competing ideas and challenge their own opinions. r Rewarding:using rewardsboth positive and negativeto encourage desired innovation behaviors. At 3M, a company that has institutionalized innovation, product inventors are rewarded with seed capital that allows them to develop their new product ideas. After securing seed capital, the product champion is allowed to assemble a venture team to develop the product. As the venture achieves certain revenue goals, the team members receive raises, promotions, and recognition. One such recognition is the Golden Step award, given if the new product is launched and reaches a revenue goal of $4 million worldwide. At another cutoff, a separate business unit is created and the product champion is given the opportunity to head it. Another recognition is the Carlton award, given to technical employees who have made major contributions to 3M through fundamental technical innovation. r Managing linkages: (a) internally to ensure that innovation-related activities in various parts of the organization are strategically aligned and coordinated. At Hewlett-Packard, innovation councils are involved in removing internal roadblocks and developing coordination processes across units; other companies, such as SRI International, create cross-group solutions teams, made up of managers from different business units and whose role is to pursue opportunities that lie between organizational boundaries and combine the competencies of various units; (b) externally to bring external perspective inside, tap into ideas, resources, and technologies from the outside, or organize co-innovation with partner organizations for new solutions or systems. Companies such as BMW have established Thought Leader Resource

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Exhibit 4. Innovation Leadership Roles: IDEA and ARMS

Networks with key expert individualscalled associates in the case of BMWfrom external laboratories, universities, research institutions, consulting rms, and contract manufacturers. These innovation leaders are part of a knowledge network that can be tapped at any time on the latest technology trends and innovations, and provides recommendations about specic issues, challenges, and opportunities. r Supporting: providing teams with the necessary resources and structuring tools to implement innovation. At Hewlett-Packard, innovation leaders participate in innovation councils, whose role involves evaluating projects and ensuring that each project has sufcient sponsorship, resources, and support. Innovation requires IDEA (to generate energy, create commitment, and direct individuals toward the vision) and ARMS (to ensure that people really do act accordingly). The rst function is normally devoted to the CEO orgiven the limitations of one single individualto the top management, requiring visible empowerment and adequate composition of

the top management team. The second function necessitates a broader set of individuals and the extension of innovation leadership responsibilities toward the senior (operating) management team, involving managers one or two levels down from the executive team. Hence, innovation leadership must reside at both levels in the organization (see Exhibit 4). IBM and Whirlpool both illustrate this dual localization of leadership. At IBM, Lou Gerstner (former IBM CEO) is generally credited with inspiring and driving the turnaround of IBM from a struggling hardware manufacturer toward a leader in IT services and e-business. But Dave Grossman, a programmer, played a key leadership role. Frustrated by the previous situation, he assembled a coalition that championed the new idea and brought it into practice. At Whirlpool, former CEO David Whitwam provided the vision of Innovation for Everyone and Everywhere and took on the role of chief innovation ofcer. The top management team was in charge of driving the innovation efforts. Jeff Fettig (former COO and then CEO) was appointed as the chief architect of innovation, while Nancy Snyder

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was the global vice president of innovation, leading the innovation efforts across the company together with the top 25 ofcers in charge of driving and enabling innovation diffusion and new growth activities in their business units. The next level of management had a different role. New leadership roles were created, called regional vice presidents/general managers of innovation, supported by regional innovation boards (i-boards) and innovation teams (i-teams) and innovation mentors and consultants. I-boards met monthly and were in charge of championing new projects, removing barriers, and managing linkages across entities, as well as overseeing funding of new ideas and ventures. I-teams were in charge of advocating new ideas and generating strategic insights. Part-time innovation mentors and full-time innovation consultants were fostering innovation, coaching and supporting would-be innovators, and helping them push their ideas forward. They also managed linkages with the companys divisions and monitored and managed the pipeline process.19
Different Leaders for Different Strategies

Exhibit 5. Innovation Strategic Focus

DEGREE

Radical

New product*

System

Incremental

Improved product*

Solution

Product*

With partners

SCOPE

* Here product means product, process, or service

ing, as was the case for the development of IBM Solutions (combining hardware, software, and consulting services) or Nestles Nespresso. r New systems, such as TiVOs TV recording on demand, or iTunes/iPods music distribution system require pragmatic architects, focusing on visioning, partnering, and master planning.

There are different typologies of innovation, but essentially innovation can be characterized by its degree (radical vs. incremental) and by its scope (product, process, service, solution, system or business model). This denes four generic types of strategic focus20 for innovation (see Exhibit 5). Arguably, those different strategies require different types of focus.

Can Innovation Leaders Scale? Innovation Leadership and Organizations Stage

r Improved products need team sport coaches,

focusing on challenging, setting goals, and measuring. r New products require no-nonsense sponsors with a focus on nurturing, challenging, and empowering. Howard Schulz at Starbucks or Steve Jobs at Apple are archetypical of this category of leaders. r New solutions need orchestra conductors who focus on interpreting, orchestrating, and integrat-

Innovation leadership is not immutable: skills, style, and habits have to be adapted as the organization evolves. In start-ups and small companies, true innovation leaders have a dual role. They must be charismaticleading innovation and leading the people who make innovation happen and instrumentalcreating an environment than encourages innovation. But as the company gets larger, the one-man show reaches limitations. Examples abound about entrepreneurs and leaders who did great at starting a business but failed to adapt their leadership capabilities to the needs of their growing business. Four characteristics that work well for leaders of start-ups or small businesses can become liabilities as the company grows larger:

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r Loyalty to comrades. Blind loyalty to people who

were at the start of the business can become a liability when it becomes large. r Task orientation. A pure hands-on style when the company is small becomes ill adapted when it becomes larger. Ratan Tata, the executive chairman of Tata Motors, a huge Indian conglomerate, has managed to keep an entrepreneurial management style while not engaging in microlevel operational details. He regularly meets on some projects with his senior executives as well as his management team and workforce, listens to their reports, shares his views and thoughts, and at the end generally asks what support is required from him and the Board to complete the pending work successfully. But he does not interfere with their actions and rather offers trust and condence that they will deliver the required results. r Single-mindedness. This can be an asset when driving a vision for a radical innovation, but the lack of a broader view may become a problem when the company grows. r Working in isolation. When the organization gets larger, the number and importance of stakeholders increases. The success of future innovation depends on satisfying the diverse needs of employees, customers, suppliers, and other external groups. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., initiated a process to stay in touch with the real world. Every week, starting on Monday, senior executives travel around the world to visit Wal-Mart and competitors stores and meet with employees, customers, and suppliers. They gather direct information unltered by hierarchy. On Friday, back in the corporate ofces, they discuss what they have seen and on Saturday, they hold a videoconference with thousands of store managers where they share their observations and provide directions for the following week.21 Through listening and seeking input from others, successful leaders are able to change their habits and adapt their behavior as their company evolves.

Innovation Leadership and Stages of Innovation

Even though innovation leaders must be able to perform both in the front-end and the back-end phases of innovation, their style of leadership must evolve during stages of innovation.22 Visionary leadership is necessary at the beginning of the innovation process, then a participative leadership style is needed to get the employees involved, followed by transactional leadership.
Innovation Leadership and Characteristics of Team Members

Innovation leadership style may be sensible not only to the stage of team development but also to individual characteristics of team members.23 The leader should adapt his or her style to the individuals, in particular to their needs (e.g., autonomy) and abilities (e.g., self-efcacy),24 and more than one style of leadership is effective for the functioning of teams. For example, ve leadership factors are considered to be relevant for the efciency of self-managing teams (e.g., R&D teams with dependent tasks and job autonomy): consideration, initiating, charisma, participative or consultative, and coaching.25

Innovation Leader or Innovation Leadership? Toward Embedded Leadership Leadership has long been viewed as a solitary creativity exercise, and individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci, Louis Pasteur, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs have been seen as innovation geniuses who generated and implemented breakthrough ideas on their own. But more recently, research and actual practice have shown that in complex organizations and environments, an individual leader is not sufcient to drive successful innovation efforts.

Through listening and seeking input from others, successful leaders are able to change their habits and adapt their behavior as their company evolves.

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r Critical mass. When MGE UPS Systems, a leader

in power protection devices for computers, was confronted with the lack of innovation in their French R&D laboratory, they decided to inject a dose of leadership. They sent a seasoned leader from their U.S. R&D department to take on an important position in France as a program manager in charge of a major development project. The idea was that the drive and behavior of the newcomer would not only rub off on his own team but would also inspire the rest of the R&D organization. But soon it became clear that the new innovation leader was clueless in changing the processes and behaviors of the local team and that the conservative habits of the local organization were in fact starting to affect his own behavior. The solution was to send him back to the United States before it was too late. The story reveals a problem of critical mass: an innovation leader aloneeven at a high levelmay not have the power and impact to profoundly change the culture of the local organization. r Chain of leadership. Rather than relying on an individual alone, Deschamps advocates the concept of a chain of leadership, where a series of leaders with complementary skills successively and seamlessly take the leadership role in the different phases of the development project. Deschamps26 gives the example of Tetra Packs retortable carton package project (named Tetra Recart) where, over a ten-year time frame, a succession of technical, business, and executive champions worked together and in succession to provide an uninterrupted chain of leadership. r Collaborative innovation. Where the chain of leadership provides a solution to the time dimension of innovation, it fails to properly address the space dimension in a world of open, networked innovation. Innovations such as Apples iPod have been developed by matching inhouse ingredients with outside technologies, in what is often called network innovation.27 In this environment, innovation leaders must orchestrate and integrate technologies, ideas, and

people from various horizons. Their role is not to be the source of ideas but to encourage and champion ideas. People have a lot of great ideas, if you give them space to do their thing and create an environment that is collaborative, not competitiveif you never say Thats silly when theyre thinking out of the box, said Mark Dean, vice president of systems of IBM Research.28 Innovation becomes like a team sport where the innovation leader plays the role of captain: on the eld and guiding the team players. And as in a sports team, in a successful innovation project the performance of the team is stronger than what could be achieved by the sum of the individual talents. The traditional model of top-down leadership is replaced by network systems of elective actions.29 This new model of innovation and leadership is now embraced by many hightech companies, and John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems, mentioned at a recent Fortune magazine conference that this change would lead to a 10-percent annual productivity increase for Cisco over the next decade. Traditional companies may also up the benets by raising awareness of the need to change, experimenting with new collaborative tools (McKinsey or Disney), developing new collaborative processes, providing infrastructure to enable collaboration (Procter & Gamble and the Centers for Disease Control), and building a culture of collaboration.30

Where the chain of leadership provides a solution to the time dimension of innovation, it fails to properly address the space dimension in a world of open, networked innovation.

r Embedded and transferable leadership. At its

best, the performance of collaborative innovation may even be such that groups made up of normal people may outperform those made up of people with the right stuff.31 At this level, the innovative capability of individual people is

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of second order: what drives creativity and innovation is the collaborative interaction of whoever wants to contribute. Leadership is not in the hands of an individual or a group of individuals, but is now embedded in the organization of the participants. Open Source software or Wikipedia are examples of innovations driven by voluntary collaborative participation, and where the action of each is generating positive externalities for the others. This ultimate form of collaborative innovation32 is not specic to software or Internet companies. Innovation communities exist on physical products such as sports equipment (e.g., mountain bikes, snowboards, surfboards) or surgical equipment (e.g., clinical chemical analyzers).33 A small U.K. company producing gauges and other measuring devices for the fuel tanks of lling stations has reached 80 percent market share on the European market. Throughout the organization, employees at all levels feel enabled to nd and solve problems, often experimenting with different solutions and frequently failing, but at least learning and sharing that information for others to build on: improvement projects are everywhere. The operations director comments: It doesnt bother me that I dont know in detail whats going on. They all know the strategy, they all have a clear idea of what we have to do [. . .]. Theyve all been trained, they know how to run improvement projects and they work as a team. And I trust them.34 In a recent article35 inspired by leadership behavior in honeybee swarms, Couzin et al. observe that in animal groups, making movement decisions depends on social interactions among group members. They study groups where few individuals have pertinent information on where to go and how to get there (as is often the case in innovation), where group members do not know which individuals have pertinent information, and where informed individuals may differ in their preferred direction due to differences in experience or motivation. Using a simple model where individuals balance

their preference to move in a given direction with their desire to maintain social interactions with group members, they highlight the importance of feedback mechanisms to reinforce the leaders36 and demonstrate the ability of a group to achieve a consensus for the majority option when differences are relatively small. This is especially relevant for innovation: feedback mechanisms such as other peoples opinions, surveys, tests, and beta versions are necessary along the way to reinforce the leaders. And the ability to achieve a consensus when there is no major disagreement in the direction pursued is a guarantee of efciency. Furthermore, Couzin et al. show that leaders do not have to be identied. Leadership can emerge as a function of information differences among members of a population and is therefore transferable. For those who may argue that embedding leadership is easier said than done, the model of Couzin et al. brings a positive note. They demonstrate that the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of informed individuals needed to lead the group with a given accuracy,37 suggesting that in large rms only a relatively small proportion of innovation leaders is required.

For those who may argue that embedding leadership is easier said than done, the model of Couzin et al. brings a positive note. They demonstrate that the larger the group, the smaller the proportion of informed individuals needed to lead the group with a given accuracy.

Innovation Leadership: Diverse and Dispersed Stories about emblematic innovation leaders have masked that innovation is not in general the fact of one single individual, even at the top. Innovation leaders share a common set of attributes and abilities. But in complex organizations and environment, leadership roles are diverse and must t organization and innovation stage, strategy, and organizational

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level. A single individual or a few key leaders, even at the top, should not be expected to reunite all those abilities. Companies wishing to implement sustained innovation should set up a pool of diverse innovation leaders at different levels of the organization who can offer varying leadership roles at different organizational and innovation stages and suit the evolving requirements of the innovation strategy. Leadership needs to be conceived as something that happens across functions and levels and evolves along the organizations and the innovation strategys life cycle. Top management leadership is as much about generating dispersed (embedded) leadership within the organization as it is about direct involvement. And the primary role of innovation leaders should be to create a climate for innovation.38 Notes
1. Amabile, T. M. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(9), 7787. 2. Deschamps, J. P. (2008). Innovation leaders: How senior executives stimulate, steer, and sustain innovation. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. 3. The tolerance rule is one of 3Ms golden rules of innovation: employees are guaranteed to keep their position in the event of failure of their project. 4. See note 2. 5. Henderson, R. Technology Strategy course, MIT Sloan School of Management. 6. See note 2. 7. Interview with J. P. Deschamps. 8. Collins, J. (2001). Level 5 leadership. Harvard Business Review, 79(1), 6776. These 11 good-to-great companies were selected for their great performance out of the 1,435 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995. 9. Gilley, A., Dixon, P., & Gilley, J. W. (2008). Characteristics of leadership effectiveness: Implementing change and driving innovation in organizations. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 19(2), 153169. 10. Ibid.

11. See note 2. 12. Jung, D., Wu, A., & Chow, C. W. (2008). Towards understanding the direct and indirect effects of CEOs transformational leadership on rm innovation. The Leadership Quarterly, 19, 582594. 13. See, for example, Verloop, J. (2004). Insight in innovation: Managing innovation by understanding the laws of innovation. Boston, MA: Elsevier. For Verloop, there is no successful innovative company without a committed CEO (twelfth law of innovation). 14. Cited by Skarzynski, P., & Gibson, R. (2008). Innovation to the core: A blueprint for transforming the way your company innovates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press. 15. Cited by Davila, T., Epstein, M., & Shelton, R. (2006). Making innovation work: How to manage IT, measure it, and prot from it. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing. 16. Bossink, B. A. G. (2007). Leadership for sustainable innovation. International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development, 6(2), 135149. 17. Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). Beyond the charismatic leader: Leadership and organizational change. In M. L. Tushman & P. Anderson (Eds.), Managing strategic innovation and change (2nd ed., pp. 563576). New York: Oxford University Press. 18. An instrumental leadership style includes structuring, controlling and rewarding, while an interactive style involves empowering, cooperating and developing additional leadership (see note 16). 19. For a description of Whirlpools innovation infrastructure see Snyder, N. T., & Duarte, D. L. (2003). Strategic innovation: Embedding innovation as a core competency in your organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 20. J. P. Deschamps analyzes four dimensions but ends up with those four strategic thrusts. 21. Bhattacharyya, S. (2006). Entrepreneurship and innovation: How leadership style makes the difference. Vikalpa, 31(1), 107115. 22. Manz, C. C., Bastien, D. T., Hostager, T. J., & Shapiro, G. L. (1989). Leadership and innovation: A longitudinal process view. In A. H. Van de Ven, H. L. Angle, & M. Scott Poole (Eds.), Research on the management of innovation: The Minnesota studies (pp. 613636). New York: Harper & Row.

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23. House, R. J. (1971). A path goal theory of leadership effectiveness. Administrative Science Quarterly, 16, 321328. 24. Stocker, J. I., Looise, J. C., Fissher, O. A. M., & de Jong, R. D. (2001). Leadership and innovation: Relations between leadership, individual characteristics and the functioning of teams. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 12, 11411151. 25. Ibid. 26. See note 2 (Chapter 8). 27. Network innovation is not limited to the high-tech industry: pharmaceutical companies or consumer goods companies such as Procter & Gamble practice it. 28. In Davenport, T. H., Leibold, M., & Voelpel, S. (2006). Strategic management in the innovation economy. Erlangen, Germany: Publicis Corporate Publishing and Wiley. 29. Rodriguez, D., & Solomon, D. (2007). Leadership and innovation in a networked world. Innovations, 2, 313. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Sometimes also called high-involvement innovation. See Bessant, J. (2003). High involvement innovation. Chichester, UK: Wiley. 33. von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing innovation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 34. Taken from Tidd, J., Bessant, J., & Pavitt, K. (2005). Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market

and organizational change (3rd ed.). Chichester, UK: Wiley. 35. Couzin, I. D., Krauze, J., Franks, N. R., & Levin, S. A. (2005). Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move. Nature, 433, 513516. 36. When informed individuals nd themselves moving in a similar direction to their preferred direction, it reinforces their preference; otherwise it reduces it. 37. The authors note that in honeybee swarms, only 5 percent of individuals can guide the group to a new nest site (from Seeley, T. D. [1985]. Honeybee ecology: A study of adaptation in social life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; pp. 7174. 38. Isaksen, S., & Todd, J. (2006). Meeting the innovation challenge: Leadership for transformation and growth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Roland Bel is a professor of strategy and innovation at the Euromed School of Management in Marseille, France. He has 20 years of international management experience in Europe, the United States, and Asia, for companies such as ESSO, Hewlett-Packard, Schneider Electric, and MGE UPS Systems. Dr. Bels research interests are in the area of the theory of organizations, international strategy, and innovation, with a focus on the scope of the rm, hybrid organizations, and the impact of innovation strategies and organization on rm performance.

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