What is the role of the C-Suite in empowering in-novation?

C-suite executives play a critical role in licensing innovation within their companies and also ensuring that innovation pays practical business dividends. Although it might seem a contradiction in terms, innovation in commercial enterprises needs to be managed to ensure that time and energy isn’t needlessly wasted pursuing ideas that are unlikely to have any practical benefit.

Commercial enterprises are not academic universities conducting basic research to discover new mathematical theorems or invent new technologies. They are money-making ventures seeking to adapt new concepts and tools to their business models in ways that can increase their revenues or profitability.
All too frequently innovation is described in terms of new technologies but innovation can also occur by adopting new methodologies such as Agile development or DevOps engineering. It can also occur simply by recruiting new staff members who have deep expertise in technologies that a company is already employing. For example, a company that has experimentally moved 10% of its computing work-loads to a public cloud service would be well advised to hire individuals with deep expertise in cloud operations if it plans to move an additional 50% of its legacy workloads to the cloud over the next 18 months [ ... ]