Choices for Innovating Leaders

Leading an innovation-building initiative is a lonely position. It requires managing change, but it also requires the leader to be chief arbiter of where, how and to what extent change must happen. CHOICES for Innovating Leaders - Dilemmas & Best Practices in Building Innovativeness helps innovation leaders explore some of the most intractable dilemmas that are encountered on the road to corporate innovation success.

This book's distinctive contribution is to apply a magnifying glass, across ten self-contained chapters, to a selection of common management dilemmas, from Dreaming and Doing to Macro-vision and Micromanagement and many others in between. Its aim is to equip leaders with clarity and a pragmatic outlook that will allow them to achieve a higher level of innovative performance in their organisations and to adapt with speed and agility to a rapidly changing environment. By offering an authoritative yet reflective, thoughtful and practitioner-led approach, it stands out as distinctive among today's innovation literature.

CHOICES for Innovating Leaders is an excellent companion for leaders in public and private sector organisations, whether newcomers or seasoned innovators, who wish to build innovative capacity in their teams or organisations. Each chapter provides rich supportive argumentation to help a manager negotiate diverse perspectives of the targeted topic and to make the best decisions. It also offers guidance for action without being overly prescriptive, thus helping readers to think more clearly, act more confidently, and make decisions they can justify to themselves and others. The book's discussions are not about technology and are mostly technology agnostic. That is to say that they focus on organisational, cultural and behavioural aspects of leading innovation, all of which apply to nearly every type of business.

Frank Devitt, PhD, balances strong academic credibility with twenty-five years of practitioner experience as corporate engineer, general manager, entrepreneur and consultant. It culminates in a clear, authoritative style to deliver the book's insightful reflections that are at the same time profound yet immediately actionable by the reader. Frank is also the author of ARRIVE - A Design Innovation Framework to Deliver Breakthrough Services, Products and Experiences (2021).

Frank Devitt, PhD, is an innovator and committed critical thinker with an international career as business leader, entrepreneur, engineering manager, researcher, professor and author. His entrepreneurial and strategic management experience has spanned many countries and diverse sectors including industrial electronics, automation, energy, web-based learning and academia. Frank's professional passion is to deliver high quality and high-value outputs with care, skill and efficiency, founded on thorough understanding of sound principles and the best available data.Frank regularly hosts engaging workshops on innovation management, strategy and design thinking, and he continues to deliver coaching to mid-level and senior leaders. Known for his clear, authoritative style with sound judgement and pragmatism, Frank offers credible and actionable insights shaped by decades of leadership, scholarship and advisory work. In 2021 he published Arrive, which describes a comprehensive framework for design thinking as a driver for breakthrough innovation.