Wish to Build an Innovative Company? Fire Your Innovation Officer

If you want your company to invent the “next big thing,” your first instinct might be to hire a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO). It looks great on a press release. Plus, it signals to investors that you’re serious about the future.

But if you really want to transform your business, you should probably fire the CINO instead. The problem isn’t the person; it’s the position. By creating a dedicated “Innovation Department,” you might accidentally be killing the very thing you are trying to save.

Why the Innovation Officer Fails

When you appoint an Innovation Officer, you centralise innovation – sending a loud, clear message to the rest of your staff that innovation is not part of their job.

The marketing team stops thinking about new ways to reach customers. The engineers stop dreaming up new products. The customer service reps stop suggesting fixes for recurring problems. Why should they? There’s a department down the corridor that gets paid to do that.

The skills required to operate a business (efficiency, conformity, risk mitigation) are the exact opposite of those needed to innovate (challenging the status quo, breaking processes, accepting failure). The CINO role tends to be filled by “conventionally competent” people who understand the business, rather than true disrupters who are often seen as “difficult” employees.

Moreover, when innovation gets trapped in a lab or an “innovation hub,” the innovation team can feel disconnected from the core business. Innovation then becomes siloed. Instead of a natural flow of ideas from the frontline, creativity becomes a top-down mandate. The CINO becomes a bottleneck. Every idea must pass through their desk, and if it doesn’t fit their specific vision, it dies.

Like with every rule, there are exceptions. Elon Musk and his leadership at Tesla and SpaceX provide a rare, high-stakes exception. Musk employs an extreme top-down approach, often acting as the singular CINO himself. By setting impossible deadlines and micromanaging technical details, he forces a culture of “first principles thinking” from the top. A classic example is the development of the SpaceX Starship. Traditionally, rockets were made from expensive carbon fibre or aerospace-grade aluminium. Musk, reasoning from first principles, personally questioned this industry standard. He realised that 301 stainless steel, the same material used in high-end kitchen appliances, was much cheaper and more durable at extreme temperatures, and could be welded outdoors in a tent. This wasn’t a suggestion from a committee; it was a directive from the top that ignored decades of best practices. While this top-down obsession with detail led to massive cost savings and the world’s most powerful rocket, it also shows why the model is so unique: it requires a leader who is as much an engineer as they are a CEO.

How to Build a Truly Innovative Company

Real innovation is decentralised. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum or in the trenches. To build a truly innovative company, you must move from “Innovation-by-One” to “Innovation-by-All.”

Look at Toyota. They didn’t become a global leader because a single executive had a genius idea. They succeeded through Kaizen, the philosophy of continuous improvement by everyone. Any worker on the assembly line, from the newest hire to the most senior manager, has the power and the responsibility to suggest a change or even stop the line to fix a problem.

Amazon uses a similar all-in approach. The ecommerce giant doesn’t have one single person deciding what’s innovative. Instead, they use a “Working Backwards” process. Any employee with a big idea can write a mock press release and an FAQ document. If the logic holds up, the company builds it. This culture gave us Amazon Prime and AWS, innovations that would likely have been killed in a traditional, siloed corporate structure.

The Role of Leadership

If you don’t have an Innovation Officer, who’s in charge? The answer is everyone, led by you. The leader’s job isn’t to be the Chief Ideator; it is to be the Chief Culture Architect. Instead of managing ideas, you could manage the environment where ideas grow.

Remove Fear

Innovation requires failure. If your employees are afraid of being fired for a project that doesn’t work, they will never suggest anything new. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, the feeling that you won’t be punished for making a mistake, was the number one predictor of high-performing, innovative teams.

Give Time

3M is known for its “15% rule,” where employees are encouraged to spend 15% of their working time on personal ideas and pet projects. The time given to explore led to some of the company’s most successful products, such as Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes. Similarly, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, encouraged engineers to spend 20% of their time working on what they thought would most benefit the company. The aim was to encourage creativity, passion projects, and cross-pollination of ideas. This gave rise to key products, including Gmail, Google News, and AdSense.

Listen to the Frontline

The people talking to your customers every day know what’s broken. Give them a direct channel to suggest fixes without going through five layers of management.

Innovation as a Natural Reflex

Innovation should not be a department; it should be a reflex. It should be the way your people breathe, think and work every single day. When you dissolve the Innovation Lab and give the responsibility and power back to your employees, you unlock the collective intelligence of your entire organisation. You stop waiting for one person to have a Eureka moment and start benefiting from a thousand small improvements happening every hour.