Innovation Insights for Leaders

Innovation Insights for Leaders workshop with senior leaders of sport and recreation associations in Victoria

Are the leaders of an organisation ready to lead innovation just because they are seasoned leaders of the current business? Based on my experience, almost all organisations assume so, and more than one might actually find the question offensive.

But that assumption is often proven wrong. Even leaders who want their organisation to become more innovative often struggle to adequately support innovation, especially transformative innovation.

Still, innovation cannot thrive without propre leadership support. In 2020, I have synthesised the key learnings from The Invincible Company, from collaborations with innovation thought leaders such as Greg Bernarda, Tendayi Vicki, Alex Osterwalder and from my 20+ year experience into a program to help leaders adjust their leadership to achieve better outcomes with their transformative innovation endeavours. It starts with a workshop called Innovation Insights for Leaders to allow time and space for senior leaders to reflect on those topics.

The discussion in such a workshop creates the opportunity to:

1. raise leaders’ awareness on the radical difference between exploration and exploitation,

2. make explicit their role in supporting and challenging innovation teams, 

3. make explicit their role in designing and nurturing an innovation ecosystem.

More on the typical topics covered in an Innovation Insights for Leaders workshop can be found in my recent blogpost: Are your leaders also ready to lead innovation?

The vast majority of the programs I run with leaders of large organisations are confidential. But in 2021 I was lucky to run a face-to-face program for VicSport to work with senior leaders and board members of sport and recreation associations in Victoria on how to use innovation to tackle the challenges caused by digitalisation, covid-19, among others.

“Decision makers are the ones who need to be fully across the potential of the innovation process,” said Tom Dixon who organised the VicSport event. “They may not do all the work themselves but they are the ones who will empower people and invest in the process and/or system that can achieve the outcomes.”

In exploration as well as exploitation, the role of senior leaders is critical, even though it is so different. And innovation can only thrive in a large organisation when its leaders learn to pause in the space between stimulus and response and then choose the response that truly supports exploration. The future growth and resilience of many organisations lie indeed in this critical awareness of leaders.