Chief Innovation Officer Research Articles

Evonik keeps the faith in R&D

Organizing R&D at a major specialty chemical maker like Evonik Industries can seem at first like an overwhelming task. The German firm sells materials in countless formulations to multiple industries. It employs 2,800 researchers at 40 locations worldwide. But orchestrating the efforts of all these scientists in a meaningful way is actually surprisingly simple, according to Ulrich Kusthardt, the company’s chief innovation officer. “About 90% of our R&D is very decentralized,” Kusthardt said. Most of Evonik’s researchers spend their time responding to requests from customers and potential customers, meaning that top management doesn’t need to provide much direction or oversight. “It’s locally managed and provides a secure return on our investment,” he said. Kusthardt was in Singapore recently for the opening of Evonik’s newest R&D center, a relatively small lab that will employ about 50 people. The researchers there will contribute to the other 10% of Evonik’s R&D effort: long-term,

Does your school need a chief innovation officer?

In their book The Innovative University, published in 2011, Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring define the “theory of disruptive innovation.” The authors maintain that although the traditional university is indispensable, technology and innovation are disrupting the status quo.

Best practices in early phase medical device development: Engineering, prototyping, and the beginnings of a quality management system

Kristy Fearis is the founder and president of KPConsulting. She has held various positions in the medical device and research industry. She has led programs for medical industry leaders Medtronic, Edward Lifesciences, and Kimberly-Clark Healthcare to develop and commercialize Class II and III devices. Although a true quality management systems specialist at heart, Kristy has a passion for effectively and efficiently applying quality systems principles to early stage development to maximize benefit while minimizing impact on resources and time to market. Kristy works with both precommercial and commercial companies to build and implement quality systems that are "right sized" and support both an effective business model and high product quality. Aidan Petrie is the cofounder and chief innovation officer of Ximedica. Aidan drives innovation in Ximedica's core markets of medical device development and consumer healthcare. With a focus on human-centered design, usability, technical innovation and industrial design, Aidan has helped bring hundreds of products to market. Ranging from simple drug compliance aids to wearable therapeutics, home monitoring products, and complex surgical systems, Aidan challenges his teams to rethink the role design plays in the success of each product. Covering topics around usability, sensor and wearable technology, and current trends in medical design and development, Aidan is a sought-after industry speaker and widely published author. In addition to his role at Ximedica, Aidan advises multiple startups in the healthcare space and has interests in a number of related companies. He sits on the Board of MassArt and teaches and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Harvard iLab, and others. Aidan holds an undergraduate degree from Central St Martins in product design/engineering and a Masters in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design.

“How much is this worth?” Humana’s Chief Innovation Officer Explains Why This is the Wrong Question

Chris Kay, Humana’s Chief Innovation Officer, shared insights into the innovation decision-making process. Kay discussed specific strategies employed by Humana to bring consumer insights to action and he shared examples of the development of innovation ideas. “The first, and most often wrong, question is, ‘How much is this worth?’” Chris Kay, the Chief Innovation Officer at the $50B health and wellness company Humana, shared his perspective on the criteria in selecting innovation ideas. Business leaders have a tendency to examine how much an innovation is worth in the early phases of innovation, but Kay argued organizations should focus measurements on customer desirability. During a one hour interview Kay discussed a number of interesting innovation topics including why asking “How much is this worth?” is the wrong question to ask early in the innovation process. Kay confirmed that the majority of value is created in understanding the customer experience and innovating around it. At Humana early metrics concentrate on experiential measures of member health. Experiential measures are driven by research and based on customer insights and unmet needs. Kay also discussed the importance of Co-creation, an innovation approach where Humana partners with smaller startup companies on new ideas. Humana’s innovation team seeks the best and brightest venture capital backed start-ups to form partnerships. Creating a shared view of success allows both the partner and Humana to capture knowledge, build value, and learn from failures. Decisions on these disruptive innovation ideas are typically made by a team of external partners, advisors, and leaders outside of Humana’s established lines of business. Innovation at Humana also occurs internal to the organization. Humana is a diverse health and wellness company with lines of business including health insurance, health data analytics, pharmacy, and healthcare service providers. Kay highlights the importance of working across horizontal lines of business in such a large organization to minimize the effects of innovating in silos. Working off of horizontal platforms allows the company to take advantage of diverse resources to gain synergies when pursuing innovation ideas. Innovation across horizontals also increases transparency and allows Humana to build a portfolio of innovation ideas.

Yes Bank: Innovation in money transfer

Subject area Banking, Emerging Markets, Innovation. Study level/applicability Undergraduate Business students and MBA students. Case overview This case describes the creation of YES MONEY: a domestic remittance service for migrant workers. Broadly, the case is about conceiving and deploying an information and communication technology-based solution for financial inclusion. It describes how Anand Bajaj, chief innovation officer at YES BANK, created a solution for migrant workers who wished to send their money to their families in rural India. Expected learning outcomes Gaining a better understanding of the process of creating new services, especially in the banking industry. Understanding the context in which YES BANK operated when it created YES MONEY. Drawing general lessons that can be applied to innovation, especially in emerging markets. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

The Role of the Chief Innovation Officer

Jane Stevenson has placed chief innovation officers, growth-oriented CEOs, and other innovation leaders at many companies. She also consults with leadership teams and boards about the skills they need to drive innovation. That experience has given her a unique perspective on what it takes to build innovative teams and growth businesses. In this interview, she shares her thoughts regarding the characteristics of a growth leader and what it takes to be successful taking on innovation leadership. JIM EUCHNER [JE]: As an executive recruiter, you have placed many chief innovation officers and other growth leaders. This gives you a unique perspective. Why do you think the role of the chief innovation officer has emerged over the last five or seven years? JANE STEVENSON [JS]: There has been so much focus on cost cutting and profit at the expense of growth that organizations now want someone to have specific accountability to drive growth. And innovation and growth are linked hand in hand. We've seen this phenomenon in the past in other areas. For example, we had a focus on quality when companies faced a lot of quality issues, and we started to see heads of quality separate from other roles; similarly, for a time there was a focus on hiring heads of re-engineering. The creation of these roles is usually a response organizationally to something that's missing. In the case of think another reason is that innovation bridges several different areas. Typically, it bridges product development and R&D, the strategy function, and the marketing function. Bridging those three areas in a way that creates seamless interaction is typically where innovation happens the best. Having a chief innovation officer provides that bridge in an organizationally understandable way. JE: What backgrounds are most typical for chief innovation officers? Do you see people that come from one of those three functions more than others? JS: Actually, that's the challenge: identifying which one is most appropriate for a given context. In most searches for chief innovation officers, we look at people who have a heritage in any of these three areas. The right fit is dependent on the person more than anything else, certainly more than on their functional heritage. Most likely, he or she will have also been in a role as a successful P&L leader who has achieved growth through innovation. The bottom line is that a growth leader has got to be someone who can go far beyond his or her area of functional expertise. They tend to be people who think broadly. Innovation is not a confined sport, if you will. If you think in terms of a football analogy, this is a person who could play football on a field with no lines. That flexibility is somewhat inherent to the type of person who's going to be able to do well in the role. Likewise, they aren't going to tend to have stayed in their own sphere. If they are in R&D, they would have branched out and will be viewed as much as a consumer insights or marketing strategy person as an R&D person. Or, if someone comes from marketing or strategy, they're probably going to have been very involved in product development in a way that makes them credible and able to effectively harness and get the best out of engineering and R&D organizations. JE: Do you see a lot of people coming from strategy into the chief innovation officer role? JS: The challenge with strategy is that sometimes the person who heads up strategy is not as prone to have executed something, and what clients are generally looking for--and certainly what I'm looking for in searches--is somebody who has met the test of moving ideas to commercial reality. JE: Innovation, as you've written elsewhere, is really broad. There are many different types of innovation. For some of them execution is more straightforward than for others. When companies are looking for a chief innovation officer, are they just thinking, I need innovation, or are they thinking more specifically? …

The View from 2038

The IRI2038 project will explore plausible yet provocative scenarios for the future of RD this is frequently accomplished through videos or narratives set in the future. This column takes the form of a 2038 interview with a retiring R&D executive looking back at what has changed over her career, illustrating the potential impacts of several trends and weak signals identified by the IRI2038 process. On May 15, 2038, IRI's Director of Futures Studies, Nikhita Cruise, sat down with Dr. Rachel Chen, retiring Chief Innovation Officer of one the world's largest consumer products companies, to talk about how much the development of new products and the management of R&D have changed over the course of Chen's 30-year career. NIKHITA CRUISE [NC]: Good morning, Dr. Chen. First, I want to thank you for taking time to talk with IRI about the changes you have seen over the course of your outstanding career. For the benefit of our readers, listeners, and viewers, perhaps you could briefly tell us about your career. RACHEL CHEN [RC]: Good morning to you, Nikhita, and thank you for those kind words. As far as my own history, I joined my firm right out of college in 2008 as a research scientist in the U.S. labs of our skincare division. My first management job was six years later, when I became section head of a team researching OTC drugs for improved digestion in our Shanghai facility. I spent ten years in Shanghai, moving up the management ranks, gaining experience in other business units. By the 2020s, our businesses in Africa were growing exponentially, so I moved here to our research facility in Addis Ababa, where I have remained ever since. Five years later, I was named Chief Innovation Officer. You know, Nikhita, this interview itself is an example of one of the biggest changes we've all seen over the last few decades. It was just 10 years ago that intelligent avatars became intelligent enough to stand in for humans in meetings around the world, finally solving the age-old problem of conducting meetings across time zones. I'm sitting here in my den having my morning coffee, being interviewed by a real-time hologram of your avatar two meters away from me, who is simultaneously seeing me as if I were in your den. Meantime, the real Nikhita Cruise is sound asleep in her Alexandria home. [Dr. Chen looks at holographic image more closely.] Wait a minute, that really is you, isn't it, Nikhita? I don't even remember the time zones anymore--What time is it there on the East Coast? Midnight? NC: It's actually I AM here, but don't worry about it. I have been looking forward to doing this interview in person for a long time. But your point about how technology has impacted the way we communicate and collaborate is well taken. My first question, then: For over lO0 years, your company has been famous for its skill and innovation in consumer research. Can you tell us how you have seen that change? RC: Certainly. When I joined the company, we did a lot of direct consumer research. Now, the only research with real consumers is done by our contract product developers. When we want to test a major new product idea ourselves, we usually go to one of the human simulation companies. Back around 2020, Henry Markram was finally successful in developing a neuron-level simulation of the human brain. Five years later, full human simulators were available, and five years after that, firms like Real Simulations, Inc., started appearing, offering to test new products on thousands of simulated humans of any demographic profile. …

How Does Sustainability Disclosure Drive Behavior Change?

In 2011, as part of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), over 3,700 companies disclosed information about their energy use, emissions, risks, opportunities, and strategy to their institutional investors and customers. In this article, the Chief Innovation Officer of CDP discusses five ways that such disclosure is expected to lead to changes in corporate behavior.The first two are “internal” mechanisms that tend to encourage constructive change more or less directly as a result of going through the process of disclosure. One is known as “WGMGM,” which is shorthand for the often‐cited principle that “what gets measured gets managed.” The second is the tendency of disclosure to bring about valuable changes in strategic thinking.The next two are mechanisms that work to effect change through “external” channels. One relies on the use of data to enable investors, regulators, and other corporate stakeholders to draw comparisons among companies and industries in assessing the value implications of climate change disclosure. The second involves competitor benchmarking and the growing use of data in investment research.Fifth and last, recent evidence suggests that a growing number of investors are willing to raise the bar in terms of the expectations they place on companies to act responsibly now in the face of current and expected future changes.Each of these five change processes are discussed while citing evidence drawn from CDP's long experience of managing the disclosure process and working with both investors and companies to convert data into action.

SCENES FROM THE ACS MEETING IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Treva Brown (right), an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, explains her research project during the undergraduate poster session. (Photos counterclockwise from left) Candidates for 2010 president-elect Mary Virginia Orna (from left), Cheryl A. Martin, and Nancy B. Jackson chatted with ACS members during Sci-Mix. Thomas M. Connelly Jr. (right), chief innovation officer at DuPont, receives the Division of Business Development & Management 2009 Henry F. Whalen Jr. Award; from left are Whalen and division President Anthonie Lombard. Attendees at the presidential outreach event included Jose (J. D.) Garcia (from left), president of the board of directors of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos & Native Americans in Science; Pamala Silas, CEO of the American Indian Science & Engineering Society; Victor McCrary, president of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists & Chemical Engineers; and ACS President Thomas H. Lane. (Photo at left) Kids react to a science show...

Developing Products with a Holistic Process

Design Management ReviewVolume 19, Issue 3 p. 68-73 Developing Products with a Holistic Process Aidan Petrie, Aidan Petrie Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, XimedicaSearch for more papers by this author Aidan Petrie, Aidan Petrie Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, XimedicaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 June 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1948-7169.2008.tb00131.xCitations: 2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume19, Issue3Summer 2008Pages 68-73 RelatedInformation

Toxic processes challenged at the Strategos “Innovation Academy”

In a session of the Strategos Innovation Academy, participants considered how a number of core management processes – for example, strategic planning, capital budgeting, performance assessment and product and process development – inhibit innovation. Working in groups, the participants identified problems with existing practices and then suggested a number of ways to make the process less toxic to innovation. Today’s strategic‐planning processes rarely emphasize radical innovation – the new business concepts and operational models that are necessary to keep corporations at the head of the pack – either implicitly or explicitly. Another failure that participants identified is the linkage between strategy planning and the annual budgetary cycle. To improve strategic planning, participants made a number of other suggestions, many of which derive from the toxicities and failures of the existing strategic‐planning process. Companies should first ensure that their business definition and associated mission statement are broad. Narrow definitions are likely to reduce a company’s identity to its current business model, thereby impeding the possibility of renewal. Companies should also explicitly include innovation in the strategic‐planning process. A chief innovation officer – a new senior‐level appointee in the company – can help ensure that innovation remains central to the strategic‐planning process. Greater scrutiny of strategic plans can also help. For example, CEOs can reject strategic plans that do not include a substantial amount of innovation. The introduction of new metrics for innovation would help formalize this commitment to innovation. Participants also recommended that companies find ways to dissociate the strategic‐planning process from an annual schedule. Instead, the process needs to become continuous. To this end, some participants advocated renaming the process strategic evolution instead of strategic planning.