Innovation Leadership

A leader's ability to discover and implement innovations is crucial to adapting to changing technologies and customer preferences, enhancing employee creativity, developing new products, supporting market competitiveness, and sustaining economic growth. Gliddon and Rothwell provide an exciting and comprehensive resource for readers that are currently seeking to build success in organizations with new ideas. Innovation leadership involves synthesizing different leadership styles in organizations to influence employees to produce creative ideas, products, services, and solutions. It is a practice and an approach to organization development and organizational change. Innovation leadership commonly includes four basic stages, which are: (a) support for idea generation, (b) identifying innovations, (c) evaluating innovations, and (d) implementation. There are two types of innovations, including: (a) exploratory innovation, which involves generating brand new ideas, and (b) value-added innovation, which involves modifying and renewing ideas that already exist. The two fundamental leadership theories that are generally necessary for innovation leadership are path-goal theory and Leader Member Exchange theory.

The key role in the practice of innovation leadership is that of the innovation leader. However, there are currently multiple perspectives on the definition of an innovation leader. An individual in an organization, a group within an organization, the organization itself, and even a community, state, or nation can be considered an innovation leader. The book explores each of these perspectives on the definition of an innovation leader.

David G. Gliddon is Lead Faculty in the College of Business and Management at Colorado Technical University, USA. He earned his doctorate and undergraduate degrees from Pennsylvania State University, USA, and his Master's degree from the University of Scranton, USA. As part of his post-doctoral work, he earned certificates from MIT, Yale, and the University of Cambridge, UK. As a member of the White House Community Leaders program, Dr. Gliddon attended a White House briefing and met President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at a White House reception.

William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPLP Fellow is President of Rothwell & Associates, Inc. and Rothwell & Associates, LLC. He is also a Professor-in-Charge of the Workforce Education and Development program, Department of Learning and Performance Systems, at Pennsylvania State University, University Park campus. He has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 300 books, book chapters, and articles – including over 90 books. He has also worked as a consultant for over 40 multinational corporations, including Motorola China, General Motors, Ford, and many others.