Innovation Champions are those who promote, encourage, prod, support, and drive innovation in their organizations.

1. Idea Championing: The Role of People Who Make It Happen
Viktor Dörfler – Jolán Velencei –Zoltán Baracskai
People who have the ideas, the so called idea practitioners, do not talk to corporate governance.
And they should not. They don’t speak the same language, they are not interested in the same issues
and therefore in they are not interested in the same aspects of creativity. The smart strategies from
the top can only result in reforms. However, the change, which is the essence of rejuvenation, can
only be achieved by revolutions that usually start from the bottom. Every revolution has a germ from
which it starts, a prophet, who leads the revolution and sufficient number of followers. In this paper
we are interested in the germ, i.e. the creative idea, and the prophet, i.e. the idea champion. We do
not know much about the process of creativity in which the idea is born. What we have seen is the
creative person and the outcome of creativity. The crucial question for the corporate governance is
which idea to finance. We are tackling a more fundamental question here concerning how it is de-
cided which creative idea is taken forward? More profoundly: has the time come for the corporate
governance to decide the fate of creative ideas through negotiating with the idea champions instead
of made-up feasibility studies?