From Industry Expert to Innovation Leader: The Journey of a Chief Innovation Officer

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Innovation is on everyone’s minds. In fact, a recent survey found that 90% of CEOs claim innovation is a top priority. And yet, only 10% are satisfied with their organization’s ability to innovate. That gap reveals a deeper challenge: innovation isn’t just about ideas or industry expertise—it’s about leadership.

For Chief Innovation Officers (CINOs), the transition from being an industry expert to becoming an innovation leader is critical. CINOs are often brilliant when it comes to understanding trends, technologies, and market dynamics. But leading innovation within an organization requires a different skill set: the ability to foster a culture of experimentation, rally teams around a shared vision, and guide them through the highs and lows of the creative process.

What exactly is standing in the way of more organizations unlocking their full innovation potential?

The Challenges of Leading Innovation

Expertise vs. Leadership

Many Chief Innovation Officers have deep industry knowledge, but that expertise can sometimes create blind spots. CINOs may know what innovations need to happen, but struggle with the how—how to lead teams through uncertainty, how to encourage risk-taking, and how to transform ideas into scalable solutions.

Industry expertise, while valuable, can create a tendency to focus on “proven” methods and known solutions. True innovation requires being comfortable with ambiguity and building environments where others feel empowered to experiment and fail forward.

The Innovation Culture Disconnect

Innovation doesn’t thrive in command-and-control environments. For companies to close the 90%-10% gap, innovation leaders need to create cultures that promote psychological safety—where people are free to challenge ideas, experiment with new approaches, and collaborate across departments.

Too often, organizations prioritize speed and efficiency over the messy, iterative process of discovery. CINOs who can instill a sense of curiosity and adaptability into the company culture will be far more effective at generating long-term innovation.

Navigating Resistance to Change

One of the biggest hurdles CINOs face is resistance to change. Even when new ideas emerge, implementing them can feel like trying to turn a battleship. Teams may be risk-averse, stakeholders might be attached to the status quo, and resources are often scarce.

Without strong leadership and clear processes, innovation initiatives risk stalling out before they even get off the ground.

From Industry Expert to Innovation Leader: Key Strategies for Success

Leverage Innovation Assessments to Understand Your Culture

Before you can lead an innovation transformation, you need to understand where your organization stands. Using tools like the Centered Innovation Assessments can provide critical insights into your organization’s strengths and barriers to innovation.

These assessments give you a starting point, showing where gaps in creativity, collaboration, or leadership may exist. From there, you can tailor your approach to address those pain points and make innovation a sustainable, scalable part of the culture.

Run Design Sprints to Build Momentum

A CIO’s role isn’t just to generate ideas—it’s to turn those ideas into tangible results. That’s where Design Sprints come in. These intensive, cross-functional workshops help teams rapidly prototype and validate ideas before committing significant resources.

Design sprints enable CINOs to foster collaboration across departments and eliminate silos. They also give teams a structured way to test ideas, fail fast, and iterate quickly—all crucial ingredients for innovation success.

Invest In Leadership and Team Coaching

Innovation is a team effort, and leadership is key. For CINOs to drive meaningful change, they need to build and nurture strong, resilient teams. Leadership and team coaching can help unlock that potential by developing leaders who can coach and inspire their teams to embrace change, take risks, and drive toward breakthrough solutions.

Coaching can also help CINOs themselves. Innovation leadership requires a unique set of skills—balancing visionary thinking with practical execution, encouraging experimentation while managing risk. Coaching helps CINOs sharpen their ability to communicate, delegate, and build cultures of trust and collaboration.

Psychological Safety

Create Psychological Safety and Embrace Failure Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires an environment where people feel safe to take risks and voice unconventional ideas. CINOs need to be intentional about creating this kind of culture by modeling vulnerability, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and recognizing not just successes, but bold attempts.

This means moving away from a culture of perfectionism and creating clear feedback loops so teams can learn from failures and improve continuously.

Closing the Gap: Why Leadership Matters

Ultimately, innovation leadership is about much more than coming up with great ideas. It’s about creating the conditions where those ideas can flourish. It’s about building a culture that encourages learning and experimentation, where people feel empowered to challenge the status quo and pursue new possibilities.

For Chief Innovation Officers, the journey from industry expert to innovation leader involves more than just expanding your toolkit—it requires evolving your mindset. The best CINOs aren’t just experts in their fields. They are the catalysts for change, the connectors who bridge ideas with execution, and the champions of cultures that value curiosity, creativity, and resilience.

By leveraging tools like innovation assessments, design sprints, and leadership coaching, CINOs can close the gap between aspiration and reality, turning innovation from a buzzword into a sustainable driver of growth and competitive advantage.

If innovation is truly a top priority, it’s time for leaders to build the environments that make it possible.

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About JL Heather

JL is a executive coach, speaker, and author specializing in helping leaders and organizations ignite innovation by elevating how the lead, collaborate, and execute.

JL has 20+ years of experience where he has helped organizations develop Empowered Leadership, Transformative Thinking, and Continuous Improvement. He has partnered with companies like VML, Ford, Pfizer, Wendy’s, T-Mobile, and GE to enhance their ability to innovate and deliver value.

🔹 Certified Professional Coactive Coach (CPCC)

🔹 Associate Certified Coach (ACC), International Coaching Federation

🔹 Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) Certified

🔹 Hundreds of coaching hours with senior and executive leaders

🔹 20 years applying Lean/Agile principles to leadership and organizational growth

🔹 Facilitated hundreds of workshops, from Design Sprints to executive team development

He is passionate about guiding teams and leaders through transformation. He creates environments where people can safely challenge assumptions, develop new approaches, and co-create solutions that drive innovation.

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