Read time: 3 mins
Why Is Innovation Important in Leadership
The problems facing society and the planet clearly require new and innovative solutions. Addressing these challenges therefore requires a different type of leadership, one that fosters creativity, collaboration and transformation. In this video, Rodrigo Canales, Program Co-Convener on the Women’s Leadership Program from the Yale School of Management Executive Education, discusses the importance of radically new forms of leadership.
Leading innovation goes beyond being creative or implementing new technologies, it requires conceptualizing a viable new offering, and ushering it through to implementation. This holistic approach requires strong, forward-thinking leaders.
Transcript
Why are we talking about innovation in a leadership program? First reason is that if you think about the biggest problems that we’re facing in the world today, they clearly require a different approach to solving them. Many of them are much more complex than what we have faced before. They sit at the intersection of sectors and organizations, such that the processes and approaches that have helped organizations become successful solving problems is not going to work for the types of issues that we’re facing in the world.
To address these problems, we need a different type of leadership. One that is much more integrative and much more able to collaborate across organizations. So in a way, we need a type of leadership that is much more transformative.
You can think of leadership in two different ways. We often think of leadership as helping people get to where they want to go. But if you’re helping people get to where they already knew they wanted to go, I often see that as just management. And, of course, being a good manager is wonderful and we need good managers in the world. But what we’re talking about, what we’re thinking about, the biggest problems that the world is facing is we need a radically different approach. We need to convince people that a different path is possible and then convince them to come along with us.
If you think about that type of transformative leadership, then innovation is at its core, because you’re imagining and crafting a different path.
What is innovation anyway? There are many misconceptions about innovation that are not helpful, and that is one of the reasons why most organizations out there are actually not very good at managing innovation. The first misconception that we often have is that we think of innovation as creativity. We equate innovation with just coming up with ideas.
There are a lot of excellent ideas that somehow never succeeded. Somebody came up with an idea and it didn’t work, and then somebody else came up with exactly the same idea either just a little bit of time before, sometimes exactly at the same time, and that second person succeeded where the first failed.
So, the quality of the idea cannot be the whole part of the story. There’s something else that is required for true transformation or innovation.
A starting point for that would be to think of innovation as the creation of a viable new offering. Why viable? Until your innovation is standing on its own two feet and is able to survive on its own, you are not done. All you have is a hypothesis.
The new part, I don’t think I need to convince you of; if it’s not novel, it’s not innovation. But the offering part I think is important, because again, we want to move away from just thinking about products and technologies, because some of the biggest transformations that we need are actually not technological or product-driven, but it’s more about transforming something else.
Now, while I think that this definition of innovation as a creation of a viable new offering is a good starting point, it’s still framing innovation as a noun. And when you frame something as a noun, it creates this image that there’s a moment when it happens. Whereas I think it’s actually much more productive to think of innovation as a verb. Looking for the problems that matter, and working through them systematically to deliver elegant solutions.
When you think of innovating as looking from the problems that matter, that means that you’re constantly searching for new problems that require attention and whose solutions might provide an improvement for somebody’s life.