246. 5 Types of Innovation Leaders: From Nonsense to C-Suite

Some "Heads of Innovation" are glorified event planners while others transform entire businesses.

In this episode, you'll learn how to identify which type of innovation leader you're dealing with and what that means for your career or business.

This episode is for you if you:

• Want to pursue a career in corporate innovation
• Are a founder pitching to corporate innovation departments
• Are an executive designing innovation roles for your company
• Need to collaborate with innovation teams but aren't sure of their actual authority
• Are an investor evaluating a company's innovation claims

You'll learn which innovation roles are career dead-ends, which ones lead to the C-suite, and how to quickly identify who has real decision-making power versus who's just organising hackathons with no implementation authority.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Podcast: 96. How to innovate at a corporate: lessons from Apple and Intel
• FREE GUIDE: Innovate, but how? The Pragmatist's guide to growth

Timestamps

00:50 Innovation Roles

02:58 Five Types of Innovation Leaders

05:45 Innovation Theater Director

09:05 Innovation Community Manager

11:57 Corporate Entrepreneur

14:52 R&D Leader

17:50 Transforming Businesses

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Transcript

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.321)
In this episode, I'm going to tell you what corporate heads of innovation actually do and the five distinct types you'll encounter. And some of these jobs are really important and some of them, well, they're just nonsense. So whether you're considering this career path or whether you're working with innovation teams or pitching to them, understanding who you are pitching to will help you identify who has real decision-making power versus who's just organizing events.

This insider knowledge will save you time and set realistic expectations and help you focus on relationships that actually have real, meaningful outcomes.

Sophia Matveeva (00:44.398)
Welcome to the Tech for non-Turkish podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach at Chicago Booth MBA, Safiya Matvei. My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak Turkish. On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes.

And most importantly, share practical advice on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to have a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you. Hello, smart people. How are you today? Last week, I was having a chat with a friend of mine who was applying for head of innovation roles at Meiji US Corporate. And we had a discussion that I thought would be interesting to you.

So I'm going to share the key points of what I told her here. And the reason I know what I'm talking about is because I have actually researched this in some depth. So I have created a guide to innovation at large corporates. And I did that based on research that I did with the University of Chicago. You'll be hearing about this guide later on in this episode.

Also, I've actually worked with corporate innovation leaders and corporate innovation departments because one of the things that Tech for Non-Techies does is provide training and provide consulting to innovation departments and people who work in innovation and corporates. So I have seen the full spectrum. But before we start talking about the five types of innovation leaders, I want to thank the super wonderful and generous and kind people

who have left this show ratings on Spotify and reviews on Apple. I have noticed that you've been responding to my requests here. And I just want you to know that I am super, super grateful and that it really does mean a lot to me when you've left your ratings and reviews. So thank you so much. So this subject is going to be super useful for those of you who want to apply for heads of innovation jobs, obviously, and also if you work in corporate innovation, but

Sophia Matveeva (02:58.562)
Not only that, this episode is useful for executives and hiring managers because this lesson will help you design innovation roles with clear mandates and appropriate authority and not create nonsense jobs if you don't mean to do so. Also, this episode is useful for entrepreneurs and for startups looking to partner with corporate innovation departments because you need to identify which leaders have actual decision-making power and budget.

And which leaders, well, you know, which leaders don't basically. And also investors. know we've got investors who listen to this. Investors are going to get insights on how to evaluate companies real innovation claims because there is a lot of nonsense out there. And I want you as an investor to determine whether a company is creating real value or just putting on a show. So.

The head of innovation job title can mean all sorts of things. And I've seen people who are called heads of innovation and it's literally a department of one and they're working from home and they never even go to the large company. And other people have, you know, massive budgets, big teams and some people have big teams who do nothing. Anyway, so some of this is innovation theater. Some of it is more like organizing events and hackathons.

And then other people do actual R &D and find ways to meaningfully create a lot of revenue to the business. And so as I said, there are five types of leaders. So throughout this episode, I'm going to share insights from my guide that I just mentioned. And the guide is called innovate, but how the pragmatists guide to growth. There's an extensive version, which you can buy online, but there is an abstract, which is a free guide. I think it's about five pages. So it's pretty substantive.

And you can get it at techfinantechies.co forward slash innovation dash guide, or much easier, just look in the show notes. And I created the full research report and the guide in partnership with researchers from the University of Chicago. So it's very high quality and the guide breaks down six distinct paths to innovation. And also I thought I'd make it fun to basically apply these different six paths, not only to corporate innovation, but also to your own life because

Sophia Matveeva (05:15.791)
I'm really inspired by Reid Hoffman's phrase that the strategies of successful businesses and successful individuals are strikingly similar. So this is totally true when it comes to innovation leaders. Okay, now let's go through the five and begin with type one, the innovation theater director. And this is not a good one. So here's what these people typically do. So they focus on creating the appearance of innovation rather than driving actual change.

They spend their time organizing speaker series, running one of hackathons and maintaining innovation labs, which really produce solutions that can really be implemented. Their budget basically goes to events and office aesthetics and PR. They have limited decision-making power and they rarely control any real budgets. And you can spot them because they use lots of buzzwords. They don't necessarily know what those buzzwords mean and they have lots of events, but

very few launched products and they're generally disconnected from people doing the real work in the company. So if you are an intelligent person with ambition, you will find this type of head of innovation role super frustrating. And you know, I actually met somebody who was in this position at a major financial company and the job looked impressive and the company was impressive. So I understand why he took the job, but when he started it,

who was literally forced to wear a white lab coat and come out at investor presentations to talk about whatever the latest buzzwords they were working on. I mean, they're working in finance. There was no reason for him to wear a white lab coat. This was literally just innovation theater. And this guy, you he was a proper professional and he found this so distasteful that he basically left quite quickly to go and do a real job. And in my guide, I call this public innovation and

In public innovation, being seen as innovative is basically as important or more important than actually being innovative. And public innovation is basically a marketing strategy. And the thing is public innovation is not inherently bad. Some companies have used it to great success, but you have to combine public innovation with other approaches because the problem arises when the only type

Sophia Matveeva (07:40.527)
of innovation happening is basically what you're doing in your marketing, because that just means that there's no substance behind the show and you can't put lipstick on a pig. Okay. Now let's get to type two. Type two is the innovation community manager. They could still be called the head of innovation, but really what they are is kind of a community manager. So here's what they do. They focus on building innovation capability across the organization. So

In reality, that means creating training programs, innovation methodologies and internal networks. They generally have modest budgets for education and facilitation. They can influence culture, but they really rarely kind of direct major investment. And their impact is measured by the number of employees trained or the number of employees who have gone through a course, know, whether they whether they learn anything or not is another whole thing.

They also measure impact on their ideas collected, but not necessarily implemented. So these roles often come from HR, from L &D, from internal communications, or from event management backgrounds. I've also seen people who have had some sort of junior consulting experience or experience in design thinking or agile going into this type of role. And honestly, these are not great options for career progression.

because you are basically rarely going to get to an executive position, you know, to a position of real power from this. And these kind of community innovation leaders, they tend to become siloed from core business operations. They don't really get taken that seriously. And the skills developed may not translate well to other business functions. So I know that the people who listen to this episode tend to be the smarter and more ambitious type. So I would suspect that

Unless you are basically feeling really run down, this is not going to be the job for you. Okay. So this type of job combines elements of what I call public innovation and process innovation. That's, know, if you're listening to this episode and following along with the guide, it's these two things. Okay. Now let's move on to number three, the corporate entrepreneur. Now this is where things start getting cool. So the corporate entrepreneur actually creates real value.

Sophia Matveeva (10:02.245)
So here is what heads of innovation who are genuine corporate entrepreneurs, what they really do. Okay. So they focus on developing new revenue streams and business models. They run pilot programs, they build MVPs, they conduct market testing and they establish partnerships. So they control meaningful investment for developing and testing new concepts. This is why obviously I'm into it. These people can green light early stage projects.

and they can secure additional funding based on results. So this is power. Money is power. Remember, their impact is measured by new revenue generated and market validation milestones. So this is where things are getting real. They do have challenges. So their main challenge is basically fighting corporate antibodies and navigating internal politics whilst showing concrete results. This basically means that if they are creating something really new,

and investing in new products, they are in the innovators dilemma. If you don't know what that is, it's a really famous book by a very famous Harvard business school professor called Clayton Christensen. And I've done episodes on the innovators dilemma a few episodes ago. So go and listen to that. So essentially, if you are a real head of innovation, who's a real corporate entrepreneur, there will be people who kind of want to carry on doing same old, same old.

in the corporate and you have to basically have the skills and also frankly the C-suite support in order to do this job properly. But if you do manage to do this job properly, then you get to invent new things. And what's great is that if you have a big corporate budget behind the new thing, then actually you can have major successes. And so generally these are the people that Harvard Business School case studies get written about. And if you do it well, it's super interesting.

great example is somebody that I interviewed earlier on in this show. It's a guy called Kapil Kaine, who is the head of innovation at Intel China. And I interviewed him in episode 96 and I pasted the link to that in the show notes. In that episode, Kapil Kaine talks about how he set up an innovation center at Intel in China, which produced millions and millions of dollars in revenue from new products invented at the center that he created.

Sophia Matveeva (12:28.355)
and he talks about how he did it. So I highly recommend you listen to that episode if you're interested in corporate innovation that has real impact. And in the innovation guide, I categorize this as a combination of breakthrough innovation and product innovation. You'll see in the guide that basically to have a successful innovation effort, there are six paths, but you should combine several paths together, don't you choose one. But

There's more info on that in the guide. Right now we're focusing on this episode and we're getting to type number four, the R &D leader. This is the head of innovation type of person who is an actual R &D leader. And I think this type of job is also really cool, but in a different way to the corporate innovator. So here is what heads of innovation who are real R &D leaders do. They focus on developing new technologies and IP with long term potential.

They manage research teams, they protect intellectual property and they create technology roadmaps. They typically have pretty big budgets. They often have dedicated research facilities. They enjoy high autonomy and massive respect within their domains. And their impact is measured by patents filed and technology transfer to business units. So you'll find these types of people most commonly in pharma, obviously.

in manufacturing and in hardware focused companies. And this is what I refer to as private innovation in the guide. And private innovation is where secrets don't leave the company walls until the product is ready to launch. And private innovation is really powerful for creating defensible competitive advantages and new markets. I'll show you what I mean. So a great example is Apple's secretive product development.

because everybody knows that Apple's working on something, but the details are kept so tightly under wraps, so secret that employees working in different teams at Apple, they don't even know what the final thing is going to be. And this extreme secrecy gives Apple this competitive advantage, which is massive. This is why, you know, they're such, and they've got such longevity. And so by the time competitors figure out what Apple is doing, Apple is already several steps ahead.

Sophia Matveeva (14:52.542)
You could see echoes of this in your personal life because sometimes our most important growth has to happen behind closed doors first. And it's kind of like getting a therapist to help you stop self-sabotaging and then basically getting these new internal skills, which nobody sees as a result, you know, having more confidence to innovate and to create new things and to go after really big opportunities.

Okay, now moving on, let's get to type five, the strategic innovation executive. This fifth type is the rarest type. So the strategic innovation executive, what do they do? They focus on transforming the core business to address a market disruption. So this is a big job. They work closely with the C-suite on strategic pivots, on acquisitions and on major investments. They can influence or control significant portions

of corporate investment. So this is important. They have real power and they have real authority to redirect resources, to basically take resources out of one bit of the corporate to another. So this is real power. Their impact is measured by company-wide transformation metrics. This is the kind of stuff that investors really look at. this type of innovator is the rarest type. And often this type of innovator

They emerge during existential threats to business because frankly, what they're doing is so painful to the company. Nobody wants to do it until they have to, although ideally they will be doing it earlier. This person is also not always called a head of innovation. So sometimes they are, but they're often the head of strategy or they have some sort of transformation leadership role. And in my experience, they often

come from a major consulting firm like McKinsey. And this type of job represents a mix of breakthrough innovation and incremental innovation, which I talk about in the guide. Okay. Now that you and I have covered these five types of innovation leaders, we've basically discovered that two are not super interesting if you are an ambitious smart person, but three of the five have real impact and have real career progression potential. So.

Sophia Matveeva (17:19.756)
How do you figure out which type of innovation leader you're dealing with or which type of innovation position you're going for? So you don't want to end up in the first two if you think you're going to end up in number three. So here are some practical ways to figure it out. Look beyond the title to budget control and reporting structure. Basically, are you going to have any real money? Ask about specific launched initiatives and their measurable impact.

Observe their relationship with core business units and executive leadership and question their decision-making authority. Basically ask, what was the largest investment you personally approved? And if you're working with innovation leaders, you basically have to figure out what type they are and adjust your expectations accordingly, because honestly, don't expect big transformative results from type one or type two leaders. So when you are seeking resources,

or support or trying to sell to corporate innovators, target leaders in types three, four and five who have real decision making power and budget. So let's sum up. The definition of innovation is creating new pools of value. And there's more on that in the guide if that doesn't make sense. Some of these roles really do create value, but others don't. Your job is to identify

which type of innovation leader you are dealing with so you can understand whether your discussions are actually going to go anywhere. So here's a quick recap of the five types of head of innovation. Number one, the innovation theater director. This person creates the appearance of innovation without real substance. So they organize events, they organize hackathons, but they rarely produce real results. And if you're ambitious, avoid this role. And if you're selling to them,

Just be realistic about the fact that they have limited budget authority. Number two, the innovation community manager. They build innovation capability through training and methodologies, but lack decision-making power for major investments. These roles rarely lead to executive positions and basically often become quite tidal. And then we have number three, the corporate entrepreneur. These leaders

Sophia Matveeva (19:45.214)
actually create value by developing new revenue streams and business models. They do run pilot programs, they build MVPs, they have meaningful investment control and they can have a big impact on the bottom line. And this job can also be a step to the top. So this is one of the interesting ones. Number four, another interesting one, the R &D leader. They develop proprietary technologies with long-term potential.

They manage research teams and they have real budgets. So think of Apple's secretive product development. That's what the R &D leader is. Okay. Number five, the final one, the strategic innovation executive. And this is the rarest type. They transform entire businesses facing disruptions. They're either in the C-suite or they're working very closely to the C-suite with strategic pivots and major investments. They have the biggest authority out of the five.

because they can take resources out of one bit of the company and direct them to another. So knowing which type you are dealing with will save you time, will help you set realistic expectations because as you can see from this, number one and number five are completely different jobs, but they might have the same title. And so if you understand who you're dealing with, you can basically focus on relationships that are going to lead to the outcomes that you want.

And if you're interested in learning more about corporate innovation, then download the free guide I have been mentioning throughout the show. So innovate, but how? The pragmatist's guide to growth. I've created it in partnership with researchers from the University of Chicago to explore six innovation paths in depth. And the link for that is in the show notes. So this was a lot of learning. You might need to listen to this episode again. And there's also a transcript if you want to basically highlight the note.

yeah, and the transcript is on the website. And if you're listening on Apple or on Spotify, just go to the show notes, you will see a link there and you will get the transcript. Okay. On that note, my dearest smart person, have you found this episode useful? If you did, you know what I'm going to ask you to do? Use your hands to press the like button if you're on YouTube or leave the show a rating and review if you're listening on Apple and on Spotify.

Sophia Matveeva (22:05.708)
because honestly, this really helps me and my team put this very high quality free learning content together for you. And it puts me in a good mood. Okay, on that note, thank you so much for lending me your ears today. Have a wonderful day and I shall be back with you this time next week. Ciao.