Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Stimulate, Steer and Sustain Innovation

Innovation capacity in any enterprise depends on specific leadership and management practices. These practices serve to stimulate, guide, engage and sustain innovation. Deschamps provides a deep and insightful analysis of innovation leadership as it applies to different environments and strategic constructs. This is an excellent framework for enterprise development. Putting a face on everyday leadership practice is part of the author's lesson. Innovation leadership is generated from the executive ranks to the front line efforts of the organization. This balance of mindset, structure and culture shape the methods and processes of innovation, as well as the outcomes of innovation. Deschamps sets forth a series of five process imperatives that are basic to leadership in different applications of innovation strategy: 1.Unbundle and Map the Innovation Process 2.Define and Disperse Process Management Roles 3.Assess, Evaluate and Improve Key Sub-Processes 4.Engage Cross-Functional Teams, Collaborate 5.Develop and Apply Process Indicators, Metrics Process concerns are often where development and innovation programs go haywire. But the author connects leadership thought and behavior with strategy, process, resources, culture and structure to redefine a company's capacity for innovation. Process becomes a channel for innovation leadership. Roughly a third of this book is dedicated to innovation models and leadership for different development imperatives. These encompass new/improved products or extensions, category innovation, business system innovation and customer experience innovation. These differences have been noted by other authors over the years, but Deschamps puts the leadership and management constructs in their proper place. That helps put the strategic agenda in focus. This is serious reading, but it provides critical insights into the conversation on innovation strategy, leadership and structure. Further, it will explain to many corporate boards and extended organizations the practical differences between dancing with innovation and causing real innovation.

I've been waiting impatiently for the publication of Deschamps' book as I had read his previous bestseller Product Juggernauts. I also had had the privilege of talking extensively with the author on innovation management 2 years ago for an interview that I published in Arthur D. Little's journal Prism. The author was still in the midst of shaping his thinking about "innovation leaders". What makes the book great is its pragmatic approach to innovation management and the realistic view on leadership. Many books on leadership position leaders as near-perfect heroes. This book acknowledges that "superman" does not exist. As a consequence, 99% of "normal" managers and executives will find this book highly accessible and relevant to their daily innovation management practice.At the same time, it is more than a concatenation of easy anecdotes and examples: it also provides structure and framework to a subject that by nature is hard to grasp yet so important.