The Chief Innovation Officer, Redefined

How to hire a CINO that can build
lasting innovation capabilities
The Chief
Innovation Officer,
Redefined

Big Entrepreneurship
The way businesses need to organize and behave has
fundamentally shifted. Across industries, companies,
and organizational functions, we have heard many of the
world’s most innovative companies echo the same challenge:
businesses must urgently embrace a more nimble and
entrepreneurial approach in order to stay competitive.
We call this challenge of how big companies can leverage
scale while staying innovative “big entrepreneurship.”
This report aims to deconstruct some of the complex
challenges around big entrepreneurship and provide
actionable insights for business leaders.
Fahrenheit 212
Fahrenheit 212 is a global innovation strategy and design
firm. We define innovation strategies and develop new
products, services, and experiences that create sustainable,
profitable growth for our clients. We challenge the belief
that innovation is inherently unreliable and have spent the
last decade designing the method, building the model, and
assembling the minds to make innovation a predictable
driver of growth for our clients’ businesses.
www.fahrenheit-212.com | marketing@fahrenheit-212.com
@fahrenheit212 | #bigentrepreneurship
5Big Entrepreneurship

It’sapositionbornoutofarealorganizationalneed,
anditisintendedasthebestwayforacompanyto
institutionalizeinnovation.Butasitstandstoday,the
ChiefInnovationOfficer(CINO)roleisthebestway
foragoodexecutivetogetfiredwithin24months.
2Big Entrepreneurship The Chief Innovation Officer, Redefined

The urgency to innovate better, faster, and more consistently
has led many companies to look for a leader to help drive
innovation. With one in five executives touting innovation as
their top priority, they are in need of a captain to help guide
the organization through turbulent times: a rapid rise in ways
to source innovation, technological advances, potential
disruptive new entrants, and complex internal politics.
The result has been the development of a Chief Innovation Officer
(CINO) role. In fact, 43% of large organizations already have a
formally accountable innovation executive in place. However,
as with nascent roles before them (such as the CTO role in the
dot-com era), this role suffers from a lack of proper definition.
The creation of the CINO position may signal the company is
ready to institutionalize change and growth, however poor role
definition risks wasting time, resources, and ultimately the
career path of a high-potential executive.
Wall Street Journal
43% of executives who responded to
the survey said their companies have
an innovation executive, compared
with 33% last year. Yet 58% of those
companies said they did not have an
innovation strategy. In other words,
for many companies the title of chief
innovation officer is mostly for show.
It’s like a new toy. Company boards
feel that they ought to have one. They
just aren’t sure what to do with it.”
“

Experience in commercial innovation teaches that a CINO
role succeeds or fails based not on the hire, but on the
structure and strategic intention that surrounds it. Before
accepting resumes, know that a CINO job description
should outline a capability; it is not simply a wish-list for
company growth. As such, start by avoiding the critical
mistakes that commonly sink CINOs.
Driving
Forces

The CINO needs a
dedicated budget
Driving Forces
A company’s in-place operating budget can be the enemy
of innovation. The operating budget, well… operates.
It presupposes function-specific solutions (marketing,
merchandising, etc.) before a problem or growth challenge is
properly identified. So when a new consumer behavior arises,
such as Millennials becoming socially conscious shoppers, the
organization is unable to react with agility. Budgets have been
set, and problem-solving projects “take” from each fiefdom’s
precious resources.
Without a dedicated budget, your CINO will spend a majority
of his or her time “selling” projects internally and fighting for
scraps of funding.
Put another way: you
wouldn’t buy a car without
fueling it. Don’t hire a
CINO without a dedicated
innovation budget to
empower them to act.

Cultural change is
not a realistic ask
Driving Forces
Are you expecting the CINO to change your culture? Don’t. The
fact is that the CINO cannot, and should not, change the culture
of an organization. No amount of open ideation competitions,
workshops, or awkward trust falls on earth can meaningfully
shift a company culture. While CINOs can help create more
innovation activity, creating a “culture of innovation” is not
actually within the power or remit of the CINO.
Culture is driven by the CEO and his or her team and is
determined by what is rewarded, valued, and how resources
are spent across an organization. It is incredibly tempting
to write “create a culture of innovation” as part of the
CINO’s job description. Cross it off, just as you would
anything else he or she can’t control or really influence.

Support must come
from the inside
Driving Forces
Innovation does not happen in a vacuum, and without the
attention and buy-in of key internal stakeholders, re-entry
of an idea into the organization can’t succeed. In addition to
C-suite champions, every CINO will require some dedicated
percentage of time from someone in every major business
unit. Each in-unit representative will help the innovation
team navigate the business, facilitate information flow,
and contribute to initiatives. These representatives are
formally accountable to the CINO and the CINO to them.
Having clear metrics and
lines of reporting help
enable this collaboration,
be that between digital,
marketing, R&D, sales or
a combination of teams.

“Harvard Business Review
Increasingly, companies are embracing collaboration as
part of their strategy to grow, by cross-selling products
to existing customers and innovating through the
recombination of existing technologies.
across sales offices, business units, sales, product
development, and marketing.”
But this won’t work unless employees
work effectively across silos —

The ideas are
the easy part
Driving Forces
The CINO is not an ideas collector. In fact, sourcing ideas is
hardly ever the problem. The challenges lie in tasks such as
defining what a “good” idea looks like, choosing which ones
to bring to life, how to make them ownable and defensible,
and prototyping and implementing. If you are hiring a CINO
to run innovation competitions and collect ideas, perhaps
a better investment is in good collaboration software.
Quirky, one of the best crowdsourcing platforms, has begun
shutting down despite having raised $150MM in venture
capital and a small army of top-tier innovation and design
talent. Ultimately, idea sourcing, and even the great directional
data it can produce, is just one input to the CINO’s role, as is
research, market analytics, business planning, and R&D.

A better job
description
for the Chief
Innovation Officer
We need a better job description for the
Chief Innovation Officer. Before starting
to re-write it, let’s understand what we
should truly be asking of a CINO.

Bring the outside in The CINO is the eyes and ears of the organization, looking beyond the
company’s own data. A CINO should seek to generate cross-category insight,
pulling inspiration for growth from beyond the organization and its core
industry. The seeds of solutions to healthcare problems can be inspired by
what’s happening in financial services; the best new consumer experience for
physical retail could emerge from new behaviors around digital couponing. In
bringing on a CINO, you are not simply hiring a “big thinker”—you are hiring
a detective, a curious problem-solver looking for signals and patterns to
pursue, with the ultimate goal of readying the organization to address them.
In parallel, this outside-in orientation requires evaluating and bringing
in third-party problem solving capabilities when needed. The CINO
must recognize and quickly be able to deploy skills such as research,
innovation strategy and product and experience development, and
design and prototyping to accelerate innovation initiatives.
01
Define innovation
portfolio metrics
Cross-functional,
creative problem solving
03
02
Develop innovators,
not just innovation
04

Think of the CINO not as the source of the “new,” but as the builder
and operator of an organization’s problem-solving engine. A “problem”
in this case can include a growth challenge (e.g. step-changing the
mobile experience or increasing average spend per visit), just as it can
represent an institutional weakness (e.g. improve customer service
or separate from a competitor). This requires pursuit of the C-Suite’s
top-down strategic priorities while also becoming the strategic
think-tank for the specific challenges of company divisions.
Cross-functional,
02
Bring the outside in01
Citi Ventures, in this model, has the mission of accelerating innovation
at scale “by merging Citi’s strategic initiatives with the best of the
entrepreneurial ecosystem.” The arm helps partner with the different
businesses at Citi to test, pilot, and commercialize new solutions
while also investing in and solving for major challenges relevant to the
broader business. The result has been the successful introduction
of several innovative pilots and proofs-of-concepts, ranging from
big data to security, across various business units at Citi.
Develop innovators,
not just innovation
04
Define innovation
portfolio metrics
03
* In full disclosure, Citi is a client of Fahrenheit 212

Institutional learning is a purposeful and valuable byproduct of innovation
initiatives. An often-overlooked component of the role, CINOs must
define, manage, and socialize this learning for the broader organization.
By considering innovation initiatives as experiments, best practice also
requires that the CINO clearly outline what metrics will inform subsequent
decisions. When launching a new in-store experience for a big-box retail
chain, how will the company measure success? Is it ROI, an NPS score,
or is it confidence that the CINO has found a consumer insight against
which the company can invest? The difference is critical, not just for
project success but the CINO’s own track record and credibility within
the organization. Many failed and fired CINOs have suffered not from
lack of ability, but from lack of properly defined measures of success.
Since the CINO owns the innovation portfolio, they also control the
metrics for what must to be met in order to release funding for the
next phase of a project. Their responsibility is to test and learn across
several experiments to optimize how and where funding and resources
are deployed in order to make better, smarter bets in the long-term.
Define innovation
portfolio metrics
Develop innovators,
not just innovation
Cross-functional,
03
04
02

Innovation is a discipline. Innovators can be found, hired, and their skill sets
can be cultivated and developed. The CINO is responsible for the presence
(or lack) of this skill set within the business units and standalone innovation
groups. This role is not about discovering the next wild thinker, but instead
focusing on nurturing and enabling innovation capability development.
The CINO should assemble a diverse team that blends analytical, deductive
reasoning with creative thought and inductive leaps. The only way the
CINO’s team improves is by taking on multiple projects—with each initiative
growing the topline as well as the company capability itself. Find a CINO
that can recognize and recruit for entrepreneurial passion within the
organization. If building and nurturing an innovation skillset isn’t part of the
CINO’s job description, it simply won’t develop beyond the one executive.
Define innovation
portfolio metrics
Develop innovators,
not just innovation
Cross-functional,
03
04
02

Are there teams and
representatives across the
organization that report to
the CINO?
Do we cultivate and train
innovation talent on a regular
basis?
Is there a defined budget
for innovation outside of the
operating budget?
Do we have the strategy in
place to decide which ideas
to bring to life?
Do we know what innovation
skillsets we need to develop or
bring into our organization?
Have we defined the
metrics for success for the
investments across our
innovation portfolio?
01 0302
04 0605
Key considerations
for big companies

Todd is Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer at
Fahrenheit 212, and the architect behind the unique theory,
capabilities, and talent that drive the company’s innovation
process. He oversees the company’s ability to predictably
unlock growth on behalf of both Fortune 500 companies and
institutional investors, and is responsible for the commercial
impact of the company’s work.
Todd is deeply dedicated to the development and training of
Fahrenheit 212’s team of innovators, driving a philosophy that
innovation is a discipline that can be analyzed, taught, and
refined. He developed the company’s teaching methodology to
transform innovation into a predictable, scalable capability.
His passion as much as profession, Todd enjoys creating the
industry’s playbook as much as running its plays.
Big Entrepreneurship
The Paradox of Scale
Incubating Innovation
Winning the Next Generation
of Innovators
The Rising Billion
The Chief Innovation Officer,
Redefined
01
02
03
04
05
About the author
Todd Rovak
Managing Partner, Chief Executive Officer
trovak@fahrenheit-212.com

Fahrenheit 212 defines innovation strategies and develops
new products, services, and experiences that create sustainable,
profitable growth for our clients.
We challenge the belief that innovation is inherently unreliable
and have spent the last decade designing the method, building
the model, and assembling the minds to make innovation a
predictable driver of growth for our clients’ businesses.
www.fahrenheit-212.com
marketing@fahrenheit-212.com
@fahrenheit212
#bigentrepreneurship
New York
665 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
+1 (646) 654 1212
London
31 Great Sutton St, London EC1V 0NA
+44 0 20 3567 0820
Copyright © 2015 Fahrenheit 212.

Innovation Enterprise, “The Rise of the Chief Innovation Offier,” (2015) http://info.theinnovationenterprise.com:rs:inn
ovationenterprise:images:Rise-innovation-officer.pdf
CXO Today, “Do You Have An Innovation Officer? Time To Check” (2014) http://www.cxotoday.com/story/does-your-
firm-has-innovation-officer-time-to-check/
IT World, “Changing of the guard: CIOs, CTOs in flux,” (2000) http://www.itworld.com/article/2783720/careers/
changing-of-the-guard--cios--ctos-in-flux.html
The Wall Street Journal, “Chief Innovation Officers: The Growth of the Other CIO” (2012) http://blogs.wsj.com/
cio/2012/04/03/chief-innovation-officers-the-growth-of-the-other-cio/
Harvard Business Review, “Who should be your Chief Innovation Officer?” (2010) https://hbr.org/2010/10/who-
should-be-your-chief-colla
Wink Product Photos, https://www.wink.com/products/
References

The Chief Innovation Officer, Redefined

The Chief Innovation Officer, Redefined

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