Innovation is one of the more important challenges for a CEO. Not only is its success critical to achieve business performance goals. But, in many important ways Innovation is unlike any other business function a CEO leads. CEO’s are not trained in innovation, staffs are small relative to the function’s impact, decisions are made in environment of ambiguity and uncertainty, and a bad decision cannot be undone quickly or without significantcost. Another way in which Innovation differs from other functions is the way success is measured. Innovation has no quantifiable KPIs and it’s extremely difficult to link innovation results from team performance.
All this is pretense to the question: How should a CEO lead innovation?