Being an innovation leader in banking might be the toughest job in Corporate America.
Consider Comerica, a Top 50 bank based in Dallas. The bank is now working up its innovation unit and hiring an “innovation leader” to run it. This innovation leader will be asked to do all the things innovation leaders do — and then some. Of course, there is the expectation that the innovation leader will deliver “potential marketplace differentiation,” install an innovation process, and drive organization improvement.
But consider all the additional, inward-facing responsibilities of this innovation leader:
- Negotiate with and provide direction to senior and executive managers to create and execute innovation goals and objectives.
- Coordinate across multi-disciplinary teams to spread innovation expertise to each area of the Service Company in an effort to drive self-service enablement of challenge framework.
- Build a network of innovation champions to foster innovation and ensure connectivity of our corporate objectives with Business Unit specific operational goals.
- Responsible for advising and influencing Lines of Business as future demand requires expansion to entire enterprise.
- Is recognized as the innovation expert and manages an innovation pipeline for the Service Company.
In other words, as much as this innovation leader will be working on innovations for Comerica customers, she will be working on innovating Comerica. In fact, there is not one mention of “customers” in the Comerica job ad. To innovate for customers is hard enough, but to excel at innovating products and an enterprise — that’s tough.
There are problems baked into the title “Innovation Leader,” because it implies that the position involves continually coming up with new ideas. Read through the job description and it stresses “innovation,” not the value or outcome of being innovative — “innovation pipeline,” “innovation champion” and “innovation expertise” (whatever that might be).
There is no value in simply coming up with something new. In other words, there is no value in “innovation” or simply being “innovative.” You are only creating value when you are solving problems. Inasmuch, I’d recommend exchanging the title “Innovation Leader” to “Chief Problem Solver.” This would shift the focus from “finding new ideas” to “finding problems that need to be solved.”
As they say, “necessity is the mother of all invention,” not “the need to come up with the next big thing is the mother of all invention.”
Interesting. Thanks for the comment.
I play a similar role to the one discussed in the article, albeit in a smaller institution, and you’re correct – innovation in itself is meaningless unless it solves real pain points. I have found that to be successful in such a conservative environment, innovation has to be a by-product of solving key issues that an organization is facing or would clearly face in the future. The other side of this equation is culture – I’ve seen quite a few companies burdened by siloed, inflexible culture try to solve the problem by creating an official innovation department. This approach is flawed for the same reason – innovative, agile culture is a by-product of how the real business is conducted. If you want innovation, agility and creativity that result in the long-term success, tackle the real issues, and let action effect change.
But the toughest challenge now is how organizations can Fingered the integrity?