"The Innovation Management's job is to do everything necessary to enable the company to reach the innovation objectives."

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Any other than that is hobby (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

To be clear, an ideation workshop here and a hackathon there just won't do it. Making a company innovative is something completely different.

Making a company innovative is not about innovation processes or tools either. It is about changing people's behaviour on several hierarchy levels. The bad news: this can be very hard and takes a lot of effort and some time. And you'll probably never succeed all the way you wish. The good news: every small step towards this goal feels good. Every little achievement of having opened a few peoples eyes, of having lifted the fog, is very rewarding. It does so much more to people than hanging around on some theoretical processes.

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Now. Innovation Management taken seriously is a huge task. For this, Innovation Management needs the legitimation to do everything necessary.

This includes for example

• Immediately stopping innovation projects if they don`t deliver expected results
• Training and coaching top executives in how to implement Innovation Leadership
• Understanding corporate politics and being a player
• Enabling people in their roles in innovation work

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"Why not stand up, define your role, your work, how you approach it and how it needs to be measured? If you don`t do it, someone else will. And you will be judged with much less expertise and foresight."

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