The main responsibility of an innovation manager is to promote innovation activities within the organization. Therefore, this position requires assisting senior management in establishing and maintaining an innovative cultural environment, designing and promoting organizational innovation strategies, promoting the implementation of change and innovation projects, and enhancing team innovation capabilities. This position mainly solves the three major problems of organizational innovation: namely, the innovation environment, innovation direction and innovation capability.
Innovation manager is an emerging position with both narrow and broad concepts.
In the narrow concept of an innovation manager, their main responsibility is to promote innovation activities within the organization. Therefore, this position requires assisting senior management in establishing and maintaining an innovative cultural environment, designing and promoting organizational innovation strategies, promoting the implementation of change and innovation projects, and enhancing team innovation capabilities. In organizations, it is often a senior or middle management position such as Chief Innovation Officer, Innovation Director, Senior Innovation Manager or Innovation Manager. Depending on the focus of their responsibilities, in some foreign companies this position is sometimes also called: Innovation Strategy Design Manager, Innovation Portfolio Manager, Innovation Process Manager, Innovation Project Manager, Innovation Insight Manager, New Business Manager etc.
The broad concept of an innovation manager refers to all levels of management involved in innovation in various departments. In other words, anyone who needs to promote innovation within their functional scope belongs to the category of innovation managers. These positions include: product managers, project managers, R&D managers, design managers, marketing managers, brand managers, supply chain managers, training managers etc. They all need to master innovative processes, tools and methods.
In today’s business environment, the importance of innovation is self-evident. However, many organizations face many obstacles in the process of innovation. The main reason is usually not a financial problem. Research shows that the problems organizations encounter in innovation mainly exist at three levels.
The first level is the problem of the innovative environment. Does the organization have a culture of mutual trust that allows failure? To succeed in innovation means inevitably going through a lot of failure. Some companies shout about innovation every day but actually require employees to succeed in every business. Once they fail they will be held personally responsible. Therefore there is mutual blame within the organization. It is naturally “difficult to reach the sky” to implement real innovation in such an environment.
To solve this level problem requires the innovation manager to analyze the market and organizational structure and choose an innovative model suitable for their own enterprise and market such as: promoting overall cultural change for innovation? Or using open innovation? Or establishing internal or external independent innovative teams etc. At the same time they also need to promote the establishment of a culture of mutual trust within innovative teams.
The second level is the problem of innovative direction. Innovation is a 360-degree problem. For organizations the most terrible thing is to work hard in the wrong direction. The key behind this is corporate innovation strategy. And on specific innovative business it reflects on evaluation standards. What standards are used to review and control product development portfolio management and process management?
Therefore the innovation manager needs to promote the formulation and actual implementation of innovative strategies based on their own enterprise situation. In domestic enterprises common problems with innovative business are either focusing on technological innovation while neglecting business model innovation or vice versa. But in fact neither type of innovation can be neglected; both legs must be used for walking with technological and business model innovations for innovations to happen. And this requires constant driving by the innovation manager. At the same time enterprises also need to adopt appropriate product development processes and portfolio management methods. Many innovative enterprises often use lean startup and agile development processes where core issues are how to find indicators that drive innovative business. This also requires a lot of meticulous work by the innovation manager.
The third level is the problem of innovative capability. Innovation is a science with a complete set of methods but many companies lack scientific tools and methods when innovating nor do they know what specific scenarios each specific innovative method applies to or what its scope is. More importantly we not only need to master how to use innovative tools but also need to solve effective information transmission problems within innovative teams but in reality many team members do not trust each other and there are “deep wells” between departments which seriously affects real implementation of innovations.
For an innovation manager not only do they need to master innovative methods but they also need to promote other members within their team mastering these methods as well so empowering their team i.e., learning and training for their team becomes very important. At the same time we not only need to master some so-called hard skills such as new technologies new tools but also need to promote some so-called soft skills such as “team guidance” “leadership” learning and improvement.
It can be seen that an innovation manager plays a very critical role in corporate innovations where they face different stakeholders in a very complex environment solving highly difficult problems. Therefore to become an excellent innovation manager one needs to master systematic knowledge of innovation management.