Innovation Leadership

INNOVATION AND INSPIRATION

Leading Leaders

Iconify help leaders execute on their ambitions to innovate by helping them recognise that innovation must now be a mindset, an intrinsic part of their company’s business model. Leaders should see innovation as the way to accelerate the speed and capability to respond to change in the changing technological landscape, customer preferences and expectations in harsher market conditions. Innovation leaders of digital era business winners will need to take these current truths and make them cohere. The ability of a business to thrive over the coming decade will depend heavily on innovation, ability to change agilely and prioritising customer experience in order to grow brand equity.

There’s has always been an opportunity to explore and exploit the great ideas of talented and committed people. Nowadays, it’s imperative that the latent talent and ideas in suppliers and partners and employees are not left dormant or die fallow. Business processes must allow capture and harvesting of these idea. First, to attract the right talent and then give them the tools to excel and harvest their ideas must be the first and fundamental purposes of leaders.

Strategic Objectives

Developing Authentic Leadership

Entrepreneurial Leadership

Innovation Frameworks

Strategic Objectives

Leading talented people is not just about strategic management. Years of validated research has shown that culture in a team is dependent to a large extent to leaders. For teams to become high performing, leadership is critical and so it makes sense that we see Leadership as the base and first component of ecosystems that foster innovation. We would contend that it’s about Leadership first, of the right People, given and receptive to the right motivations that help to formulate Culture, in that order. People are wildly different, complex and engender great ideas but also great tension. Building trust and synergies inspite of this and building the motivation required to reach the desirable state known as ‘Innovation Premium’, is a primary function of leadership.

Strategically speaking, recruiting and involving leaders that understand and pursue this scenario is paramount. Similarly, leaders that seek to create high performing teams as a strategic imperative are indispensable to the process of creating the right culture, the right teams and innovation.

This is a complex but highly interesting and essential area of building innovation ecosystems for businesses who understand that the only way to true and lasting transformation is sustainability, and that this requires innovation. Contact us to discuss next steps.

Developing Authentic Leadership

Leading talented people is about more than strategic management. Talented and smart people can often sense insincerity in leaders , and can grow to resent inconsistency, lack of clear directives in parallel with scope to make decisions within set and agreed parameters. The importance of trust in high performing teams and innovative cultures cannot be overstated. It is hard to trust what appears inauthentic and or sets up a cognitive dissonance in your teams.

This is why, Iconify Innovation Consulting sets a lot of store by authentic leadership. It cannot be faked but it can be learned with the right commitments and long term brand strategy in mind.

Entrepreneurial Leadership

The fundamental goal of Entrepreneurial Leaders…. is to create an atmosphere of innovation while helping constituents or followers
become more entrepreneurial.

Entrepreneurial leadership has to do with trying to solve problems using creativity, effecting change and progress through beginning new or as we like to call them ‘challenger or insurgent’ teams.If these people were out in the world they would start new business in response to perceived gaps and undeserved needs. In an organisational context, they can deploy these same skills passion and restlessness for solving problems, and in doing so give rise to innovation. To do so requires an environment that accepts, rewards, enables, empowers, rewards and mobilises initiative and innovation mindset.
The desire and willingness to go to great lengths at great personal cost and risk to solve this, reveals a service and helping mindset. Service Leadership is with an entrepreneurial bent is an extraordinary mix of personality attributes that can help to build extraordinary and high performing teams in an organisational context, and this latter attribute is one of the most important in appointing a leader that can help find the right people and build the appropriate culture to rally people to the entrepreneurial and innovation cause.

Implementing Innovation Frameworks

Unlike change initiatives, putting together frameworks is not so much about implementing correctives, as it is about engineering capability into the organisation. We consult to businesses on how to create innovative capability and advantage by developing innovation ecosystems but also can provide guidance to leaders on frameworks to adopt for implementing the right leadership across the estate. Leaders need ideas, but they also need tools and process for executing the leadership strategy to enable innovation gain true traction.

We build a full view across the people, infrastructure, procedural and cultural factors amongst other factors and identify required capabilities and capabilities required to create opportunities for innovation. The only requirements are a long term view and commitment to building the capacity for innovation.

Leadership for Innovation Ecosystems

Several reports, studies and papers over the last few years have highlighted the importance of leadership in cultivating innovation ecosystems. Recently, Hubbard and Rogers 2018 consolidated the factors for which leadership is a precursor and indispensable enabler for innovation.

The effectiveness of a leader has significant impacts on all other ecosystem components culturally and structurally as well as economically. It naturally falls to leaders to incept change across the organisation and establish systems and mindsets to nurture innovation.We hope you are as convinced are that innovation leadership deserves focus. Contact us to move the conversation forward.