Culture + Leadership

Culture + Leadership is about ensuring that the human side of product innovation is managed and aligned to support the business strategy. Senior leadership is engaged and encourages their best people to contribute to product innovation excellence by:

  • Creating an accepting culture for innovation and entrepreneurship
  • Fostering effective cross-functional cooperation
  • Engaging in the new product innovation prioritization and decision making process (Stage-Gate®).

5 Characteristics of Successful Culture Leadership

1. The culture clearly supports product innovation

Innovation is seen as critical to achieving the company’s growth strategies. It is treated as a respected activity. Behaviors, values and leadership styles through the company support and encourage product innovation and enables its success.

2. The organization encourages smart risk taking

The organization is not risk adverse and will take calculated risks. Killing projects is seen as the result of good innovation management, as it helps the company re-direct resources to better projects. A kill decision is not the failure of the team, rather the team is celebrated for their learning.

3. Open communication

The sharing of ideas and concepts that push boundaries is encouraged amongst employees. Leadership fosters and provides opportunities for open communication across functions, business units and locations. This openness helps to stimulate creative problem-solving and makes for more effective cross-functional collaboration on projects.

4. Rewards and recognitions

There is an appropriate reward structure that supports innovation.  New product leaders, entrepreneurs (new product champions or product innovators) and teams are recognized for their contribution, efforts, learning, and successes.

5. Senior management commitment

Senior management invests a proportionate amount of time, effort and money in encouraging innovation and in developing the people involved in it. They visibly demonstrate their ongoing support for innovation projects.

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