Ten years ago (five?) the role of “Chief Innovation Officer” was almost unheard-of. Now hardly a week goes by without a firm announcing the appointment of so-and-so to that role and title.
But what exactly Is a “CINO” and where do (where should) they come from?
Stepping back a moment to look at the composition of the more conventional inhabitants of a Law Land C-suite, JD’s are grossly over-represented–certainly compared to similarly sized companies in the corporate wild, and I don’t know what other baseline should be used. Honestly, people, what on earth does a JD degree have to do with marketing, operations, finance, or IT? (Yes, I know the answer is that JD’s confer credibility on the degree owner in the eyes of the partners, but how condescending is that to your partner-colleagues? It assumes they can’t distinguish the capable from the incompetent on the merits of performance.)
Still, we know what the presumptive qualifications are for, say, a CFO: Probably an MBA and/or CPA degree, a background in the Big 4 or an F1000 or the consulting industry, and far greater proficiency with Excel than PowerPoint. If you’re thinking it’s hard to know what the equivalent baseline might be for a CINO, you are not alone, and now Harvard Business Review has the article for you: “What Kind of Chief Innovation Officer Does Your Company Need?”
To begin with, big corporates have increasing familiarity with CINO’s: According to Egon Zehnder, 29% of the F500 now have such a role. But, they hasten to add,
“a standard definition of it has yet to emerge. The job’s responsibilities vary a lot, depending upon the company, the business challenges, and the backgrounds of the people filling the roles. Those people include everyone from seasoned executives to one-time academics, star inventors, former investment bankers, creative heads, and founders of start-ups.”
First, they advise (no surprise) figuring out just what your objectives are for your innovation initiative. “Innovation,” like “strategy,” comes in a wide variety of forms. Before you can figure out what you want your CINO to look like, you have to determine what you hope them to achieve.
Our HBR authors identify six different species.
Researchers
These are big thinkers who would dismiss anything that doesn’t constitute “the next big thing” as not worthy of being called “innovative.” Think quiet souls, lab coats, multiple degrees. They’re fond of spending their time looking for the right question to ask (a true gift, don’t get me wrong–if you don’t believe me, you need to spend more time with 8-year-olds), but not necessarily the most efficacious contribution to a for-profit enterprise.
On the other hand, if you’re in the market for true inflection-point/step-change advances, they may be just what the doctor ordered.
Engineers
The reverse of researchers, in that they’re all about stuff that works now. Theories and hypotheses may be great, but in the meantime I’m going to keep tweaking this process until it’s as optimized as can be. (Trial and error plays a large, and heroic, part in this.) If you’re pursuing incremental, marginal improvements, engineers are your folks.
Investors
Investors may be reformed VC’s or startup alumni. In this context, it does not mean they come with a bankroll they’re prepared to drop on your firm. For them, growth, not innovation, is the end goal; innovation may be the route to getting there. As you’d expect, they tend towards the numerically analytic, data-driven, and financially astute.
The downside of the investor mindset can be an undue short-termism; they can dismiss large and actually transformational initiatives as taking far too long to deliver results (even if those results could be dramatic).
Thought-provoking, as always. I voted for “engineer.” Here’s why. My micro-firm mostly does two things: we give real estate advice and we produce documents. We can continue to distinguish ourselves as givers of advice by striving to learn all we can not just about technical real estate law (we’ll never catch up to Google) but about the quirks of our hometown real estate, e.g., the part of town where “north” doesn’t mean north, the unindexed zoning approvals, and so on. No out-of-town firm can match us there.
We need the engineer for the document part of our practice: how can we continually improve the quality and reduce the cost to draft documents? In that field we compete not only against firms large and small but against self-help, free and cheap forms, and automation of various kinds. As advice usually leads to documents, anything we can do to lower the cost to provide the end product helps our clients.
I surmise that many lawyers think they are engineers when they are merely organizers.