Do companies need a Chief Innovation Officer?

The jury is out. Innovation is just a bunch of cool kids sitting in bean bags doing Design Sprints and playing with colourful post-it notes that end up in the bin. Wrong. In actual fact, innovation and new business models, reshaping the market is what will drive EBITDA post-pandemic and into 2023. Business-as-usual means dwindling revenues and a rap-id runway to insolvency or bankruptcy.

So, yes companies need to invest in a Chief Innovation Officer, an executive who has both the strategic foresight to provide clarity in the Horizon 3 vision , but also someone who can influence the CFO and execute mastery in balance sheet management to get Board sign-off on risk capital. This leadership role requires someone with the gravitas to speak the language of fail fast, lessons learnt; someone with an entrepreneurial capacity building across the organisation to transform the culture towards risk-taking, running experiments, and building new businesses [
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