I am in Denver today and tomorrow for the Chief Innovation Officer conference, and I’m delighted to be meeting and mentoring those leading their company’s innovation efforts. I’m partnering with BMG’s CEO David Silverstein and Dr. Phil Samuel for this second CIO event, and attendees come from companies like Levi Strauss, GE Energy, United Healthcare,Circuit City and Versatech to name just a few. These innovation leaders have a challenging job and come with a lot of questions about how to deliver sustainable, innovation-driven growth. As someone who has been in their shoes, I can relate to these challenges, and I am looking forward to helping them build a roadmap to create a custom strategy that will achieve their goals. 

Not surprisingly, a growing number of companies all over the world adding CIOs at very high levels within their leadership ranks:

The list continues to grow. I’ve helped many of my corporate clients across different industries (including some on this list) to restructure their organizations to stimulate innovation by appointing these uniquely-skilled leaders to champion their innovation efforts.  Several will have new innovation leaders within the next few months.
These CIOs are role models for leadership qualities and typically have the following characteristics that enable them to be successful in their roles:

•     Ability to be successful in a complex matrix environment
•     Ability to influence supervisors, peers, and subordinates in order to drive Innovation initiatives
•     High cognitive power skills
•     Strong Business Acumen Sound judgment
•     Strategic, conceptual orientation
•     High energy, flexibility, motivational and empowerment skills
•     Ability to select, retain, and delegate to an solid deputy group
•     Requires change management skills, conflict resolution skills and the ability to promote, motivate and effect positive changes for the total organization
•     Ability to inspire and motivate teams to achieve superior results

A significant amount of their time is spent stewarding innovation efforts and building capabilities across business units, functions and geographies.  They are tasked with finding creative ways to balance building tomorrow while delivering results today.  Their efforts are personally stimulating yet challenging at times.  That is why a lot of these C-suite leaders are experimenting with new metrics that go beyond financial measures. They are not satisfied with lagging metrics and are finding creative ways to demonstrate their accomplishments by looking at a simple portfolio of input and output metrics such as innovation success rates for products and services, outside idea sourcing, return on investment metrics, capability measures, and even sources of additional revenue. The area of metrics is expanding rapidly to meet the evolving needs of these C-suite leaders.  

As you can see, I have a lot of passion in these areas of innovation and an excited to share about my own rewarding experience as a CIO, championing innovation at Kimberly-Clark, and what I am seeing as a thought leader across industries with my clients today.