60 Leaders on Innovation (2021 Edition)
Sixty innovation leaders on culture, leadership and corporate innovation, in 22 chapters. The free eBook edited by George Krasadakis and Robin Nessensohn.
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60 Leaders on Innovation
22 questions on corporate innovation — answered by 60 global leaders across industries, geographies, and disciplines. The questions that don't go away.
What's Inside
Diversity of Thought.
Most innovation books offer one author's framework. 60 Leaders on Innovation offers sixty viewpoints in conversation with each other — from corporate innovation veterans at Innosight, BCG, IBM, and Microsoft to early-stage investors, public-sector ministers, and scholars who study what actually works.
The book asks 22 questions about innovation culture, methodology, the C-Suite's role, experimentation, digital transformation, and the future of work. Each question is answered by multiple contributors — and they don't all agree. The disagreements are where the value lives.
Produced by George Krasadakis — author of Innovation Mode 2.0 (Springer, 2026), holder of 20+ AI/ML patents, and founder of Ainna.ai — together with Robin Nessensohn. A community-built reference, free forever to read and to share.
Featured Contributors
Meet the Sixty Leaders
60 contributors — operators, advisors, founders, ministers, and academics. Including:
The 22 Questions
The Questions Every Innovation Leader Has to Answer
Each chapter pulls together multiple perspectives on a single question — from CEOs who built innovation from scratch to academics who study why most attempts fail.
No chapters in this topic.
Chapter 1
What makes a company innovative?
It's not about the latest technology. It's about diversity of thought, a discovery mindset, and the ability to act before the window closes. Customer obsession beats process every time.
Chapter 2
Do companies need a Chief Innovation Officer?
The most common problem: CINOs are given a microphone with no actual support. A title without authority, budget, and a team is worse than no title at all.
Chapter 3
What is the role of the C-Suite in empowering innovation?
The C-Suite sets the tone. If executives don't model curiosity and reward intelligent failure, nothing else matters — not the budget, not the methodology, not the lab.
Chapter 4
What are the essential roles and skills in a truly innovative environment?
Curiosity, customer obsession, comfort with ambiguity, bias toward action. These skills must be distributed across the organization — not locked in an innovation team.
Chapter 5
How is innovation different in the startup world?
Startups innovate because they'll die if they don't. Their advantage: focus, speed, zero legacy. The challenge most never solve: sustaining innovation through growth.
Chapter 6
How do you spot innovation opportunities?
Stop looking for ideas and start asking for problems. The best opportunities surface through everyday work — not scheduled brainstorming sessions.
Chapter 7
Does corporate innovation need a methodology?
Yes — but lightweight and adaptive. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile provide structure for uncertainty. The trap: rigid process that kills the creativity it was designed to enable.
Chapter 8
What are the essential digital tools for innovation?
The specific tools matter less than transparency. The real requirement: a platform where problems, ideas, successes, and failures are visible across the entire organization.
Chapter 9
How do you measure innovation output and impact?
If you're counting "ideas submitted," you're measuring the wrong thing. Track validation velocity, concept-to-MVP cycle time, and revenue from products that didn't exist three years ago.
Chapter 10
How important is culture for corporate innovation?
Decisive. But a "culture of innovation" isn't a poster in the lobby. It's whether your people feel safe enough to experiment, fail intelligently, and try again — without career risk.
Chapter 11
What are the most frequent innovation blockers?
Risk aversion, short-term thinking, silos, and the deadliest blocker of all: leadership that says the right things about innovation but never backs it with budget or authority.
Chapter 12
How would you establish an experimentation mindset?
Celebrate learning, not just success. Tata gives 'Dare to Try' awards for well-designed experiments that didn't work. That single policy says more than any innovation manifesto.
Chapter 13
Do companies need a community of innovators?
Communities are the connective tissue. They cross-pollinate ideas, sustain momentum between programs, and keep experimentation alive when formal initiatives end.
Chapter 14
How does innovation blend with agile development?
Agile provides the delivery cadence; innovation provides the direction. Combining the two without collapsing them into a single process is the organizational design challenge.
Chapter 15
How would you define the truly agile organization?
Not one that does sprints. One that senses change early, responds without bureaucratic friction, and treats adaptability as an operational capability — not a methodology.
Chapter 16
Do public-sector companies innovate?
They can — but face constraints the private sector doesn't: regulatory environments, political cycles, and a culture that punishes risk more than it rewards discovery.
Chapter 17
Digital Transformation — what is it all about?
Not a technology project. A business transformation enabled by technology. Every company that treats it as an IT initiative fails. To drive real transformation, you must also invest in culture — a theme explored in depth in 60 Leaders on AI.
Chapter 18
What is Open Innovation?
Sourcing ideas beyond your walls — through partnerships, ecosystems, and communities. It works when trust and IP frameworks are clear. It fails when it's treated as outsourced R&D.
Chapter 19
To patent or not? Do companies need an IP strategy?
You get what you track. Having a system to secure rights to inventions invariably leads to more inventions — and retains the key innovators who create them.
Chapter 20
What are the top technologies that will drive innovation?
AI, blockchain, quantum computing. But the technology matters less than an organization's ability to identify and exploit its applications. Tools that operationalize discovery are now the differentiator.
Chapter 21
How could innovation solve the most pressing global problems?
Climate, health, inequality — these demand innovation at a scale and speed the private sector alone cannot deliver. Most of our problems are predictable and pre-solvable — if we become anticipatory.
Get the Whole Book
286 pages of corporate-innovation thinking from 60 global leaders. No paywall. No registration. Just the PDF.
22
Questions
Across foundations, leadership, methodology, culture, and the future of innovation.
123
Perspectives
From 60 leaders across consulting, technology, academia, government, and venture.
286
Pages
Free forever to read and share. No paywall, no signup.
This is an independent project — not an Innovation Mode initiative. George Krasadakis conceived and led it in 2021. The sixty contributors took part on their own, as individual thought leaders, not representing their companies, with no affiliation to Innovation Mode. This is one of many copies in circulation. Readers are welcome to share.
Discover More
Innovation Resources
Innovation Mode 2.0
The executive operating manual. 70+ interventions, 6 Innovation Deficits diagnostic, 7-level Maturity Index. Springer, 2026.
60 Leaders on AI
The companion volume. 17 questions on artificial intelligence answered by 60 global leaders. 240+ pages. Free.
A–Z
Innovation Dictionary
60+ definitions covering AI strategy, design thinking, the Innovation Maturity Index, and the working vocabulary of innovation practitioners.
The single most important success factor of corporate innovation is a vivid environment characterized by ‘diversity of thought’ and a special ‘discovery mode’.
— George Krasadakis, from the PrefaceAdvisory
Building Innovation Capabilities?
Two 8-week advisory programs for executive teams. Innovation Advisory rebuilds the innovation function. AI Strategy Advisory turns AI ambition into a sequenced roadmap.
Both programs are built on the frameworks of Innovation Mode 2.0 (Springer, 2026). Or explore Ainna.ai — the autonomous innovation agent that operationalizes those frameworks for product teams.
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From the blog
Field notes on this subject
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Innovation Mode 2.0: The Chief Innovation Officer's Blueprint for the Agentic AI Era
Book launch announcement: Innovation Mode 2.0 by George Krasadakis (Springer, January 2026) delivers the first comprehensive architecture for corporate innovation in the agentic AI era, where AI can generate ideas, build prototypes, and shape strategies in minutes. The book introduces a diagnostic framework of six innovation deficits, a seven-level Innovation Maturity Index, and 70+ interventions for building AI-powered innovation engines. Backed by 25 years at Microsoft, Accenture, and GSK, 20+ AI patents, and a working autonomous innovation agent (Ainna.ai), this is implementation, not theory.
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Discover the six hidden deficits - from leadership to venture building - that cause corporate innovation to fail. Learn how to break through structural, cultural, and capability barriers to drive meaningful innovation.