What role does leadership play in driving successful business innovation?

Effective leadership in innovation hinges on transcending traditional management paradigms to embrace agility and foresight. It's about fostering an environment where curiosity and experimentation are not just accepted but encouraged. Leaders must shift their focus from purely operational efficiency to creating a culture that nurtures innovation. This involves not just allocating resources but actively engaging in the innovation process, understanding its nuances, and being willing to pivot strategies in response to new insights and market demands. The role of a leader is pivotal in aligning innovation with the company’s vision and goals, ensuring that each innovative step contributes meaningfully to the organization's growth.

Trust and support are critical to enabling a safe enough environment where creativity and inspiration can flourish! Teams need to feel psychologically safe to explore new horizons and follow up by putting those new ideas on the table. Leaders play a key role in creating and maintaining an environment that is safe, supportive, and empowering for all teammates to flourish.

Leadership plays a critical role in innovation. A business essentially has three buckets of work - run the current business, grow the current business and innovate for new business. Setting the stage, allocating resources and actively driving these three buckets ensures current and future success. By its very nature, innovation is doing something new. Unlike running the core business, innovation follows a different paradigm of finding the right problem, ideating, experimenting etc. leadership’s active role in developing this muscle, and willingness to embrace failure as learnings are somethings leaders should champion to create an innovative company

During my entrepreneurial journey, I found my role was primarily to enable the smart, talented people in the organization to move the business forward. Specifically, I encouraged all team members to look for better ways to serve our customers and find more efficient and effective ways to use their time. Every person, not just managers, was empowered to suggest and make changes to the business. This gave all employees a sense of belonging to our mission, job satisfaction, and the ability to create positive change.

Unlearning old paradigms and embracing new paradigms are the table stake skills for an innovation leader. Foresight for future, synthesis of mega and micro trends, imagination, creativity and an obsession to focus on customer are some skills unique to innovation. Collaboration with a diverse internal and external experts, academia are other skills leaders need to develop and advocate

As an entrepreneur, I found the key to innovation was to not just say you welcome innovation but to create a culture where innovation is celebrated in all its forms. Sometimes the innovation is as big as a new product or service. However, more often, it is improvements to small processes or business methodologies that can make a big difference. Welcoming ideas large and small empowers and excites team members and uncovers business performance improvements that often would not be seen by leaders.

Innovation is all about future and hence it is unknown. Leaders will face the duality of results today vs future. Building organizational capabilities and skills for innovation is a slow process. Human cognitive biases come into play when making decisions, so creating the right culture, process and skills are challenges leaders will face when balancing resources, expectations and investments.

One of the biggest obstacles to innovation is budget. In organizations with budget constraints (which is the majority of organizations), leaders need to decide where to invest their budget: a sure enhancement to an existing product or a risky innovation that may end up failing. Therefore, the best wy to go about it is to start small and increase investment only after the innovation provides proof of viability.

There are so many pitfalls to leading innovation that leaders need to be aware of. Idea mailbox, innovation lab, incubator, innovation department are some known point solutions that are known to fail in long run. Innovation is a discipline, strategic choice, capability, process and culture. Measurement system or innovation is very different from how operations gets measured. Given all this, innovation is a holistic, well thought and intentional endeavor needs right set of principles, mindsets, skill sets and toolsets within the operating rhythm of the organization