The Chief Innovation Officer

The mission: make the company innovate

In Innovation Mode, the mission of the innovation executive is “to empower the company to thrive through the discovery and pursuit of new business opportunities” (p. 48). It breaks down into three areas:

1. Improving the organisation’s ability to spot and frame potential opportunities.
2. Strengthening its capability to identify and validate the opportunities with high potential.
3. Aligning the leadership to invest in validated opportunities and bring new products and services to market.

“Although they typically come with extensive ability to innovate and occasionally domain expertise, innovation executives and their teams are not meant to produce innovation; they exist to enable and empower the organization to do so.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 48

This is the most misunderstood point about the role. Many companies expect their innovation leader to be the chief inventor, the source of the big ideas. The real job is the system: the agenda, the process, the tools, the culture and the measures that let thousands of people find, test and launch better ideas than any one leader could. Some companies write this into the mandate.

“[DBS] ultimately decided to give the innovation function wide latitude as long as it adhered to one boundary condition: under no circumstance should it actually innovate. The innovation team at DBS coaches and catalyses innovators within DBS versus driving innovation on its own.”Scott D. Anthony, Senior Partner, Innosight, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 37

The test of a good CINO is therefore not how many ideas they generate, but how much more innovative the company becomes: how many more opportunities it discovers, validates and launches, and how fast.

The ten responsibilities of a Chief Innovation Officer

Whatever the title and the reporting line, the innovation executive is accountable for ten things (Innovation Mode, pp. 49–51).

1. Enabling innovation

Architect the company’s innovation function and bring in the platforms, processes and tools it needs: innovation management and collaboration platforms, market intelligence, experimentation frameworks, prototyping tools and templates. Design and run the innovation programmes, the workshops and the process as a whole.

2. Setting the focus

Translate the company’s purpose and strategy into an innovation agenda: the focus areas and the problems worth solving. Keep innovation connected to business reality through regular alignment with the leadership.

3. Discovering opportunities

Establish an end-to-end process, with the right technology and governance, that speeds up how ideas are captured, assessed and flagged as opportunities, and manage an opportunity portfolio balanced across focus areas and styles of innovation.

4. Implementing opportunities

Build the teams, systems and processes that take validated opportunities to market as products and services, and drive their adoption.

5. Fostering the culture

Introduce the programmes and events that grow a genuine innovation culture, lead by example, build a community of innovators, address resistance to change and remove cultural blockers.

6. Measuring performance

Introduce a robust innovation performance measurement system, report the state of innovation, and educate the C-suite on the right success metrics and expectations.

7. Connecting internally

Bring teams and divisions together in one company-wide effort, with a shared innovation language, frameworks, methods and tools that make cross-functional work easy.

8. Connecting externally

Build relationships with start-ups, universities, industry bodies and innovation hubs, for open innovation and co-creation.

9. Providing talent

Find, develop and scale innovation skills across the company: hiring, training, defining innovation roles and career paths, mentoring rising innovators and helping every function develop innovation champions.

10. Providing resources

Secure funding in the budget cycles, set clear criteria for allocating it, and create flexible, just-in-time financing for promising initiatives.

The emphasis shifts with the position. A CINO may also own the organisational design for innovation, shape and fund R&D programmes and teams, and make specific investments.

“A C-level innovation leader is expected to emphasize strategic alignment and cultural transformation, while a VP or head of innovation might focus more on process optimization and portfolio management.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 51

CINO, VP or head of innovation?

The Chief Innovation Officer is “the most senior formal role dedicated to innovation” (Innovation Mode, p. 44). Many companies lead innovation from one level down, with a VP, director or head of innovation reporting to another executive, often the CTO or the Chief Strategy Officer. Others give innovation to an existing executive alongside their main job.

How common is the C-level role? A study by Egon Zehnder, cited in Harvard Business Review in 2019, found that by 2017, 29% of Fortune 500 companies had a senior innovation executive.

The title matters less than the mandate. Several of the leaders in 60 Leaders on Innovation make the point.

“Instead, organizations need someone whose main professional purpose is keeping them at the forefront of innovation. That person doesn’t need a Chief Innovation Officer title. But they do need to wear that hat.”Frederic Laluyaux, President and CEO, Aera Technology, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 34

“The role of a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) is to create a movement for change – to drive a shift towards a culture that fosters change. Considering this definition, it’s not the case that every company needs a CINO.”Tom Goodwin, Co-Founder, All We Have Is Now, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 23

Where the leader sits still changes what they can achieve. Below the C-suite, innovation leaders tend to struggle for resources and authority, and the programme can look like a side project. A C-level role signals that innovation is a strategic priority and gives the leader the reach to change how the company works. The six common set-ups, and the hidden risk in each, are compared in Who Should Lead Innovation?

Who the Chief Innovation Officer reports to

In the C-level model, the CINO reports directly to the CEO and has the authority and the resources to drive innovation initiatives and transformation across the company (Innovation Mode, p. 44). Some leaders add the board.

“The Chief Innovation Officer should report directly to the CEO and also present quarterly at board meetings.”Warwick Peel, Innovation Leader, Asia Pacific, IdeaScale, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 32

A direct line is not enough on its own. The role also needs clear boundaries with the other executives, so that ownership of initiatives and investments does not turn into friction, and it needs a team and a budget of its own.

“That said, a Chief Innovation Officer would need to have a very well-defined role with boundaries so there is clarity on what they will or won’t get involved with.”Alex Adamopoulos, Chief Executive Officer, Emergn, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 30

What to hire for

Exceptional innovation leaders share ten competencies, whether they sit in the C-suite or one level below (Innovation Mode, pp. 51–53):

1. Mastery of the innovation process: knowing which processes, tools and interventions the company needs, and when, and being able to architect a powerful innovation function.
2. Strategic thinking: translating the company’s purpose and strategy into an innovation agenda, programmes and roadmaps.
3. A deep understanding of technology: what current technologies can and cannot do, and what will become feasible within the company’s horizon.
4. Product sense and prioritisation: how products are conceived, validated, built and launched, and how to choose among opportunities competing for the same resources.
5. Communication: speaking the corporate, product and technical languages, to engineers, designers, commercial leaders and the C-suite.
6. Relationship building and influence: building coalitions across the company and overcoming resistance to change.
7. Customer and market understanding: staying close to customers and turning market intelligence into opportunities.
8. Financial acumen: innovation economics, business cases and sound decisions that balance the short and the long term.
9. A hands-on leadership style: leading by example, and taking part in the innovation process as an innovator.
10. Risk appetite: shaping a willingness to take calculated risks, and a healthy way to handle failure.

Appoint or promote?

Companies often promote a successful leader from the core business into the role. It is convenient: they know the products, the customers and the organisation. It usually misses the point of the job.

“Innovating versus empowering others to innovate are fundamentally different missions: the former requires domain expertise, while the latter needs primarily innovation methodology and leadership skills.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 54

When the goal is to make the organisation more innovative, the book’s advice is to appoint a leader with strong experience in innovation methods, processes and frameworks, often from outside the industry, and to fill gaps in domain knowledge with experts on their team. That leader must also be “adaptive and ready to innovate the innovation function itself” (p. 53), because the company’s culture, finances and operations will change under them. For the selection process, see How to Select a Chief Innovation Officer.

How to measure a Chief Innovation Officer

Pressure to show returns on innovation is reasonable. Being judged on the wrong measures is one of the commonest reasons the role fails.

“Many organizations evaluate long-term innovation using short-term KPIs, while others rely on vanity metrics of innovation activity, such as the number of ideas generated, patents filed, and workshops conducted.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 28

Innovation Mode measures the innovation function on four components, combined into an innovation performance scorecard that the CINO reports to the C-suite and uses to steer the programme (Chapter 9):

Output

How ideas convert into opportunities, validated concepts, and launched and adopted products, and how fast they move through that funnel.

Impact

The business results of what reaches the market, measured against success criteria and targets set before launch.

Culture

The size and activity of the innovation community, innovation morale, and the attitude to experimentation, sharing and collaboration.

Image

How innovative the outside world perceives the company to be.

The Innovation Maturity Index adds the long view: which of seven levels the company has reached, and what the next one demands.

How the role changes as the company matures

The same responsibilities play out very differently at each stage of maturity. The Innovation Maturity Index describes seven levels, and the masterplan in Innovation Mode sets out the phase that takes a company from each level to the next.

The Chief Innovation Officer in the AI era

AI makes the role more important, not less. As AI streamlines a company’s operations and makes them easy to replicate, its ability to discover, validate and pursue new opportunities becomes what sets it apart, and that ability is what the CINO is accountable for. The argument is set out in The Evolving Importance of the Chief Innovation Officer (2023).

AI has put a new executive next to the CINO. In IBM’s 2026 CEO study of 2,000 CEOs, 76% of organisations had a Chief AI Officer, up from 26% a year earlier. Some companies are merging the roles: in May 2026, Westpac appointed a Chief AI Innovation Officer.

The two roles are not the same. A Chief AI Officer leads the adoption of AI across the business: the use cases, platforms, data, governance and risk. A CINO leads the company’s ability to discover and pursue new opportunities. They meet inside the innovation function, because AI now does more and more of the innovation work itself: scanning markets, generating and assessing ideas, and testing concepts. Innovation Mode describes an AI-powered innovation function in which AI agents discover and assess opportunities and people decide.

“The role of the CAIO is still not well-defined; we will probably see a more robust definition of the boundaries of the role over the following years.”Jair Ribeiro, Artificial Intelligence Strategist, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, in 60 Leaders on AI (2022), p. 84

Our view: in the AI era, the CINO’s job becomes architecting that AI-powered innovation function, the system in which AI agents and people discover, validate and pursue opportunities together. The Chief AI Officer owns AI adoption across the business; the CINO owns what the company does with AI to find its next products, services and business models. Smaller companies will often combine the two roles. Larger ones need both, with clear boundaries between them.

Why Chief Innovation Officers fail

Innovation Mode is blunt: “corporate innovation failure always reflects leadership’s limitations or poor decisions” (p. 25). The CINO role fails in recognisable ways.

A title without the means

The role is announced, but without a team, a budget or real executive sponsorship.

Unrealistic expectations

The C-suite and the company expect a rapid transformation from programmes that deliver over long timeframes and must embrace some failure.

Political friction

Conflicts with other executives over who owns initiatives and investments, and scepticism from leaders who question what innovation contributes.

The wrong metrics

Constant pressure to prove returns, judged on measures that miss most of what the innovation function does.

The gatekeeper

A leader who centralises and controls every initiative, and becomes the bottleneck the role was meant to remove.

Innovation becomes someone else’s job

Once there is an innovation officer, people stop seeing innovation as part of their own role.

“If the Chief Innovation Officer is given a team, then amazing things happen. But by far, the most common problem is that Chief Innovation Officers are given a microphone with no actual support.”Tom Goodwin, Co-Founder, All We Have Is Now, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 24

“Some Chief Innovation Officers tend to centralize and control all innovation initiatives, they act like the innovation police. … The almighty, know-it-all Chief Innovation Officer is the best way to kill innovation.”Vincent Pirenne, Partner and Founder, Board of Innovation USA, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), pp. 26–27

Some leaders go further and see the role as temporary by design: its success is a company that innovates without it.

“In this sense you could say that success for a CINO is, essentially to make themselves redundant as, in the long run, people take that on themselves.”Tom Goodwin, Co-Founder, All We Have Is Now, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 24

Does a Chief Innovation Officer create innovation silos?

A common worry is that appointing an innovation leader creates an innovation bubble: a special team, cut off from the business, that produces impressive prototypes and little impact. The risk is real, but Innovation Mode is clear about its cause: “it is the strategy and the overall innovation program that makes or breaks silos” (p. 47), not the presence of an innovation leader.

A leader skilled in innovation methods and organisational design does the opposite. They provide capabilities, methods and consistent tools for everyone, promote collaboration and knowledge exchange, and reward the behaviours that support them. The book makes empowering others to innovate one of the role’s formal objectives. How the team around the leader is built to work that way is set out in Innovation Team Structure.

Get the role right

Most of the failures above are designed in before the leader starts: the mandate, the reporting line, the team, the budget and the measures. Corporate Innovation Advisory designs the innovation function and its leadership with your executive team, and ongoing advisory can include a fractional Chief Innovation Officer. To see where your company stands first, start with the Innovation Maturity Diagnostic.

Questions about the Chief Innovation Officer