Making Progress: The 7 Responsibilities of the Innovation Leader

You’ve landed a job leading innovation. (It might not be called “innovation” exactly. Maybe you’re responsible for growth or you’re responsible for “new products,” or services. Maybe you have your own startup and have been building your team or you’ve been asked to lead “transformation” or a labs group at a big company….) Congratulations! What do you do now? Where do you start? What do you need to know? What are your real job responsibilities? If you don’t have a job description or it doesn’t seem to fit (or if you never really looked at it), you’ll need to come up with one for yourself that goes beyond a list of projects or hiring a team. That’s where this book comes in. It’s designed to be a tactical guide for you, the person charged with leading innovation, regardless of the product or domain, no matter the organizational structure you’ve inherited or are meant to create, no matter the process you’ve adopted or want to adopt, whether you work in a brand-new start up or a Fortune 500 corporation. It’s for managers and consultants, design directors and chief innovation officers, board members, CEOs, and recruiters. It will help you juggle the needs of your team, your organization, and the projects, products, or services themselves. It will give you a framework for problem-solving your approach to innovation when the pressure to solve big problems feels bigger than ever.

Ryan Jacoby is the founder of MACHINE, a strategy and innovation company that helps innovation leaders at clients like The New York Times, Google, Marriott, Nike, Viacom, and Feeding America "Think Big and Act Small." Prior to MACHINE, Ryan led the New York office at the design and innovation firm IDEO, where he built the Business Design discipline. In some circles, he's known as the "first graduate" of the Stanford d.school.