A Chief Innovation Officer job description should describe the system the leader will build, not the ideas they will have. The job is to make the whole company innovate: to architect, run and measure the innovation function so that every team can discover, validate and launch new opportunities.
Many job descriptions for the role ask for a visionary and stop there, or list everything innovation touches. The kit below asks for what the role needs at your stage, and says what the company commits in return: a reporting line, a team, a budget and fair measures.
The kit has four parts: the job description in three versions, a scorecard, the interview questions and a plan for the first 90 days. All four are also in a free PDF of 13 pages, with every version written out: download the hiring kit.
Built on Innovation Mode (Author’s Edition, 2026), Chapters 3 and 10, with answers from 60 Leaders on Innovation. The role itself is set out in The Chief Innovation Officer.
Before you write it: five questions for the hiring team
Many of the reasons the role fails are settled before the first interview. Innovation Mode names unrealistic expectations, conflicts over who owns what, scepticism from other leaders and the wrong metrics (p. 45); a missing team or budget completes the list. Answer these five questions before the search starts. The answers are the first half of the job description.
- Which job are you hiring for? Someone to innovate in a domain, such as a new product line or an R&D programme, or someone to make the whole company innovate. They are different jobs and need different people.
- Where is the company on the Innovation Maturity Index? The level decides which of the three versions below you need.
- Who will the leader report to? A direct line to the CEO gives the role the reach to change how the company works. Below the C-suite, the leader needs a named sponsor in it.
- Is there a team and a budget, or only a title? Without a team, Tom Goodwin warns in 60 Leaders on Innovation (p. 24), the leader either leaves or learns to stop pushing.
- Where are the boundaries with the other executives? Agree them with the CTO, the Chief Product Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer and, if you have one, the Chief AI Officer, before the role is announced.
“Done from lower ranks, the innovation manager does not have the weaponry to be able to fight the umpteen naysayers who resist change.”Warwick Peel, Innovation Leader, Asia Pacific, IdeaScale, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 32
Choose the version: build, scale or lead
The responsibilities of the role stay the same at every stage; what changes is the mandate for the first year, the title, the team the leader starts with and the experience that matters most. The kit has one version for each stage of the Innovation Maturity Index.
Build is for Levels 1 to 3, when there is no innovation function yet. The typical title is Head of Innovation or Innovation Programme Director, and the first year is about assessing the current state, winning approval for the Innovation Masterplan, forming the core team and launching the first phase of the programme.
Scale is for Levels 4 and 5, when innovation runs, but not as one system. The title is Chief Innovation Officer or VP of Innovation, and the first year connects innovation to the strategy, turns scattered programmes into one opportunity pipeline and measures what it delivers. This is the version written out below.
Lead is for Levels 6 and 7, when innovation shapes the strategy. The title is Chief Innovation Officer, and the first year scales innovation across the divisions, embeds it in the business units, builds AI into discovery and validation, and grows new businesses.
Not sure which level you are at? The Innovation Maturity Index describes all seven levels, and the Innovation Maturity Diagnostic measures yours across a cross-section of the company.
The job description
Below is the Scale version in full, ready to adapt: replace the parts in brackets. The table after it lists what changes in the Build and Lead versions, and the PDF has all three written out.
Chief Innovation Officer
- Reports to
- Chief Executive Officer, with a quarterly update to the board
- Team
- The core innovation team reporting directly to you (innovation architects, innovation orchestrators, programme managers, innovation advocates and workshop facilitators), and the budget to complete it
- Location
- [Location and working pattern]
About the role
[Company] wants innovation to be something every team does, not something a few people are known for. As Chief Innovation Officer, you are accountable for the company’s ability to innovate: how well it spots, validates and brings new opportunities to market. You are not hired to be our chief inventor. You are hired to build and run the innovation function that lets everyone else invent: the agenda, the process, the tools, the culture and the measures.
Your mission
To empower [Company] to thrive through the discovery and pursuit of new business opportunities. That means improving how we spot and frame opportunities, strengthening how we identify and validate the ones with high potential, and aligning the leadership team to invest in validated opportunities and bring them to market.
What you will do
- Architect our innovation function: the platforms, processes, programmes and tools we need, and the order in which to introduce them.
- Turn our strategy into an innovation agenda of focus areas and problems worth solving, and keep it current with the leadership team.
- Build an end-to-end process for capturing, assessing and validating ideas, and manage a balanced portfolio of opportunities.
- Make sure validated opportunities reach the market: the teams, systems and handovers that take them to launch and adoption.
- Grow a genuine innovation culture and a community of innovators, address resistance to change, and lead by example.
- Measure innovation performance, and report the state of innovation to the leadership team and the board.
- Connect our teams and divisions through one innovation language, method and set of tools.
- Build relationships with start-ups, universities, industry bodies and partners.
- Develop innovation talent: roles, career paths, training, and innovation champions in every function.
- Secure funding in the budget cycle, set clear criteria for allocating it, and create flexible funding for promising initiatives.
In your first year
- Agree the innovation agenda with the leadership team, tied to our strategy.
- Bring today’s programmes, events and teams into one opportunity pipeline, from idea to validated opportunity to launch.
- Introduce an innovation performance scorecard and report it to the leadership team every quarter.
- Complete the core innovation team.
- Make the handover from validated opportunity to product team work, so that validated concepts reach the market.
What you bring
- Experience of architecting and running an innovation function or programme across a large organisation, with results you can show.
- Experience of taking new products or services from concept to market.
- Mastery of the innovation process; strategic thinking; a deep understanding of technology, including what AI can and cannot do; product sense and prioritisation; the ability to speak the corporate, product and technical languages; relationship building and influence; customer and market understanding; financial acumen; a hands-on leadership style; and an appetite for calculated risk.
- Readiness to change the innovation function itself as the company changes.
Not required: deep expertise in our industry. We will put domain experts on your team. What we need from you is the ability to make the whole company innovate.
How we will measure success
- Output: how ideas convert into validated opportunities and launched products, and how fast.
- Impact: the business results of what reaches the market, against targets set before launch.
- Culture: the size and activity of the innovation community, and the attitude to experimentation.
- Image: how innovative customers, partners and candidates see us.
We will not judge the role on activity counts such as ideas submitted or workshops held.
What we commit to
- A direct reporting line to the CEO, and regular time with the board.
- A team and a budget of your own from the first day.
- Clear boundaries with the other executives, agreed before you start.
- Measures that fit a programme designed to deliver over years.
The last section is the one most job descriptions leave out. It is also the one that tells a strong candidate whether the role can succeed.
| Part | Build (Levels 1 to 3) | Lead (Levels 6 and 7) |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Build: Head of Innovation or Innovation Programme Director | Lead: Chief Innovation Officer, on the executive committee |
| Reports to | Build: The CEO, or a member of the C-suite who sponsors the programme | Lead: The CEO, with regular board time; the scope may also cover the organisational design for innovation, R&D programmes and specific investments |
| Team at the start | Build: The budget for your first two hires, an innovation architect and a programme manager, and for the rest of the core team in the first year | Lead: The core team, plus service teams such as market intelligence, opportunity validation and venture building |
| In your first year | Build: Assess the state of innovation, win approval for the Innovation Masterplan, form the core team and launch the Power-Up phase | Lead: Scale capabilities across divisions, embed innovation in the business units, build AI into discovery and validation, and take new ventures forward |
| What you bring | Build: Has set up an innovation programme from nothing; strongest in communication, influence and hands-on leadership | Lead: Has led innovation at C-level and built new businesses, ideally with P&L responsibility |
| First-year measures | Build: The masterplan approved, the core team in place, the first innovation capabilities in use, and a baseline from the first innovation survey | Lead: Outcomes across the divisions: the share of revenue from new products, new ventures launched, and the state of the culture |
The scorecard: ten competencies
The ten competencies come from Innovation Mode (pp. 51–53). For each, the scorecard gives the evidence that shows it and the red flag that warns against it. Score each competency from 1 to 4 on evidence, not impression: 1, no evidence; 2, can describe it; 3, has done it; 4, has done it more than once, at scale. Then double the scores marked for your version.
| Competency | Strong evidence | Red flag | Weigh double for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Mastery of the innovation process | Evidence: Has architected an innovation function or programme end to end, and can explain what came first and why. | Red flag: Describes innovation as a calendar of events: hackathons, idea challenges, a lab. | Weigh double for: Build, Scale |
| 2. Strategic thinking | Evidence: Has turned a company strategy into an innovation agenda, and can trace initiatives back to it. | Red flag: Creativity with no line to the strategy or the company’s purpose. | Weigh double for: Scale, Lead |
| 3. A deep understanding of technology | Evidence: Explains what current AI can and cannot do in your context, and what will become feasible within your horizon. | Red flag: Treats technology as the answer, and forgets people, culture and process. | Weigh double for: Lead |
| 4. Product sense and prioritisation | Evidence: Has taken products from concept to market, and has stopped projects on the evidence. | Red flag: Cannot name a project they stopped. | Weigh double for: Scale, Lead |
| 5. Communication | Evidence: Moves between corporate, product and technical language in the same conversation. | Red flag: Buzzwords where specifics should be. | Weigh double for: Build |
| 6. Relationship building and influence | Evidence: Has built coalitions across functions and won over a senior leader who resisted. | Red flag: Succeeded only where they had formal authority. | Weigh double for: Build, Scale, Lead |
| 7. Customer and market understanding | Evidence: Has set up ways to sense the market and test with real customers. | Red flag: Every opportunity they mention came from inside the company. | Weigh double for: Scale |
| 8. Financial acumen | Evidence: Has secured innovation budgets, built business cases and funded work outside the annual cycle. | Red flag: Promises a return on every idea, or cannot talk about money at all. | Weigh double for: Lead |
| 9. A hands-on leadership style | Evidence: Still takes part as an innovator: ideas, prototypes, workshops. | Red flag: The gatekeeper who approves everything and contributes nothing. | Weigh double for: Build |
| 10. Risk appetite | Evidence: Can describe a failure they designed for, what the company learned and what happened to the team. | Red flag: A career without a single failure, or bets with no limit on the downside. | Weigh double for: Build, Lead |
The weights are our suggestion; adjust them to your context. One quality cuts across all ten: the leader must be “adaptive and ready to innovate the innovation function itself” (Innovation Mode, p. 53), because the company will change under them.
Scott D. Anthony describes the balance the scorecard is looking for as two strands of DNA: the alien who brings a fresh perspective, and the diplomat who knows how the organisation works.
“Chief Innovation Officers need to have enough alien DNA to push the innovation frontier. At the same time, Chief Innovation Officers need to have some diplomat DNA.”Scott D. Anthony, Senior Partner, Innosight, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 37
The interview: fourteen questions
Each question tests one or two competencies. Ask for examples, not opinions, and score the answer on the scorecard.
The role itself
What is the job of a Chief Innovation Officer: to innovate, or to make the company innovate?
Listen for the second, and what it means in practice: the system, not the ideas. (Competency 1)
Walk us through an innovation function you built. What did you put in place first, what did you leave for later, and why?
Listen for a sequence with reasons, and low-cost starts before expensive platforms. (1)
We run [two hackathons a year and an idea portal]. What would you keep, stop and add?
Listen for questions about outcomes before answers about events. (1, 4)
When did you last contribute an idea or a prototype yourself?
Listen for recent, specific examples. (9)
Strategy and portfolio
Here is our strategy. Which three problems worth solving would you put on our innovation agenda?
Listen for problems, not solutions, each traced to a strategic goal. (2)
Tell us about an innovation project you stopped. What evidence made the call?
Listen for evidence set before the project started. (4, 10)
Two opportunities compete for one budget: a safe extension of our core product and a risky new business model. How do you decide?
Listen for a portfolio view rather than a single bet. (4, 8)
Tell us about an opportunity you found and tested with real customers. What did you learn that changed the plan?
Listen for evidence from the market, not opinions from inside the company. (7)
Technology and AI
Where should AI sit in our innovation process today, and where should it not, yet?
Listen for both halves. Sophisticated AI systems add most value once the culture and the basics are in place. (3)
How would you work with our CTO and our Chief AI Officer so that you are not competing for the same initiatives?
Listen for clear ownership and a shared portfolio. See Chief AI Officer vs Chief Innovation Officer. (6)
People and influence
Tell us about a senior leader who resisted your programme. What did you do?
Listen for influence without authority, and the middle managers, not only the executives. (6)
Explain your plan to our board in two minutes. Now explain it to one of our engineering teams.
Listen for the same plan in two languages. (5)
Money, risk and measurement
How would you measure innovation here in the first year, and which numbers would you refuse to report?
Listen for output, impact and culture, and a refusal of vanity metrics such as ideas submitted. (1, 8)
Five years from now, how will we know you succeeded?
Listen for a company that innovates without depending on them. (2, 10)
The work sample
Give the shortlisted candidates a short briefing pack: the strategy, the current innovation activity and the organisation chart. Ask each to present a 90-day plan to the hiring panel. Compare the plans with the preparation steps below: the strongest put assessment and listening before announcements, and the team before the tools.
Appoint or promote?
Many companies promote a successful leader from the core business into the role. It feels safe: they know the products, the customers and the people. Innovation Mode argues that it usually hires for the wrong job.
“While deep domain understanding is essential, having extensive expertise is far less important than profound skills in innovation program architecture and leadership.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 53
Which is right depends on the job you are hiring for. Promote from within when the mission is to innovate in a domain: to lead an R&D programme, a new venture or a product line. A promoted leader brings knowledge of the products, customers and markets, internal networks and credibility. The risk is that innovation gets framed within the leader’s own expertise, with incremental improvements in place of a diverse portfolio. Formal training in innovation methods closes much of that gap.
Appoint from the market when the mission is to make the whole organisation innovate, through a transformation programme. An appointed leader brings experience of innovation methods, processes and frameworks, and fresh thinking from other industries. The book’s advice in that case is to fill the gaps in domain knowledge with experts on the leader’s team (p. 54). In our experience, knowledge of the industry matters most in regulated sectors such as healthcare, financial services and energy, where the leader must understand compliance; elsewhere, experience across industries is often the stronger card.
“Stronger CINOs, by contrast, often join the firm from outside from comparable, yet more dynamic industries. … While an external hire is not mandatory, it inherently provides a perspective that is often conducive to success.”François Candelon, Managing Director and Senior Partner, BCG, in 60 Leaders on Innovation (2021), p. 28
The outsider has to be accepted, though. Anthony warns that “too much alien gets rejected by the organization” (p. 37), which is why a sponsor who opens doors, and the boundaries agreed before the search, matter as much as the hire.
The first 90 days
Chapter 10 of Innovation Mode opens the innovation programme with a preparation phase: assess, frame and plan, then win the leadership’s approval before anything is announced. It starts with the question this kit answers.
“The first step in shaping the innovation transformation program is to identify if the right skills are available at the leadership level.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 326
The book sets the steps and their order, not a calendar. The 90-day split below is a planning convention that fits most companies.
Days 1 to 30: listen and assess
- Run the preliminary assessment: surveys and interviews with people across the hierarchy, on how innovation is perceived, what needs to change and what people expect (p. 327).
- Compare the current innovation set-up with the ideal innovation architecture: a gap analysis of capabilities, resources, skills and talent (p. 327).
- Make the first two hires: an innovation architect and a programme manager (p. 327).
- Map the stakeholders: the sponsors, product leaders, champions and domain experts (p. 329).
Days 31 to 60: frame
- Place the company on the Innovation Maturity Index, and write up the gaps, the blockers and the blind spots (pp. 327–329).
- Articulate the innovation vision with the executives: what innovation means for this company, and what success looks like (p. 327).
- Draft the innovation agenda: the strategic problems worth solving, as the leadership prioritises them (p. 328).
- Prioritise the capabilities by urgency and dependence on technology: start what is urgent and simple now; explore what is urgent and complex (pp. 334–336).
Days 61 to 90: commit
- Compile the Innovation Masterplan: the vision and goals, the agenda, the current state, the team, the budget, the success criteria, the stakeholder map and the style of innovation (pp. 328–330).
- Draft the roadmap and the hiring plan for the rest of the core team (p. 328).
- Agree the budget, and a way to request more as the programme grows (p. 329).
- Win the leadership’s approval, then prepare the announcement and the briefing for middle managers (pp. 336, 340).
After day 90, a formal announcement opens the first phase of the programme, Power-Up. With a well-staffed core team, it typically takes three to six months to reach the awareness and readiness of Level 2 (p. 338).
Two mistakes are common in these months. The first is to buy the most sophisticated platform before the basics work; the book’s principle is to “start small, release early, listen to feedback, iterate fast, and be ready to pivot” (p. 330).
“For example, a highly sophisticated, AI-powered ideation system would be of limited benefit for the first few iterations.”Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026), p. 331
The second is to start producing ideas: the new leader’s first visible output should be the plan that lets everyone else produce them. In the Scale and Lead versions the same steps apply, faster: the assessment builds on what exists, and the masterplan reorganises it rather than starting from nothing.
Questions about hiring a Chief Innovation Officer
What should a Chief Innovation Officer job description include?
What qualifications does a Chief Innovation Officer need?
Should we promote from within or hire a Chief Innovation Officer externally?
What should a new Chief Innovation Officer do in the first 90 days?
Should a Chief Innovation Officer have a P&L?
Is a head of innovation job description different from a CINO's?
Further reading
- The Chief Innovation Officer: the role, the reporting line, how to measure it and why CINOs fail.
- Who Should Lead Innovation?: the six leadership models, before you decide that a CINO is the answer.
- Innovation Team Structure: the core team the new leader builds first.
- Chief AI Officer vs Chief Innovation Officer: who owns what when both roles exist.
- Fractional Chief Innovation Officer: C-level innovation leadership before you hire the role.
- How to Become a Chief Innovation Officer: the same role, from the candidate’s side.
- Innovation Mode, Author’s Edition (2026): Chapter 3 on the innovation executive and the team; Chapter 10 on the programme.
Cite this kit
Krasadakis, G. (2026, October 24). Chief Innovation Officer job description and hiring kit. Innovation Mode. https://theinnovationmode.com/chief-innovation-officer-job-description
@online{krasadakis2026cinokit,
author = {George Krasadakis},
title = {Chief Innovation Officer job description and hiring kit},
year = {2026},
date = {2026-10-24},
organization = {Innovation Mode},
url = {https://theinnovationmode.com/chief-innovation-officer-job-description}
}
