Innovation leaders, and indeed whole innovation teams, tend to come and go. Unlike sales or marketing or finance, the entire innovation department can get wiped out with one abrupt announcement. Many Chief Innovation Officers, despite the title, don’t have a true seat at the executive table. Often, the execution resources allocated for innovation do not remotely match the level of internal hype and/or executive scrutiny.
These challenges are a fact of life for corporate innovators – and navigating them is part of the job. But these inherent difficulties are often needlessly inflamed by confusion about what type of innovation program is at play:
- Type I innovation programs – those motivated by a specific business challenge or opportunity (e.g., an energy company exploring the next-gen power grid, or an insurance company responding to the rise of insurtech)
- Type II innovation programs – generalized innovation functions that drive business value across various parts of the company in perpetuity
The differences run deep and are highly consequential. In fact, Type I and Type II programs are so different that it makes very little sense to call them both “innovation.” They have very different determinants of success, different reporting structures, and different OKRs. The types of people and processes that work best are very different.
Please join us on December 10th at 12pm ET to unpack these differences and discuss how you can improve your chances of success with both Type I and Type II programs inside your organization.
Speaker Bio
Chris Townsend, Vice President Product Marketing, Wellspring
Chris is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Wellspring, the leading provider of Growth Innovation software solutions for corporate, academic, and government clients worldwide. Chris has worked for nearly twenty years in the innovation management space, first as a thought leader at Forrester Research and then as a senior executive at solution providers in both North America and Europe. Chris holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard University. More recently, he has cultivated an interest in dad jokes.
Featured image by ahmad elsafty on Unsplash.
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