The advent of the ISO 56002 guidance on Innovation Management addresses areas of competence for Strategic Innovation. The emergence of innovation as a profession is now possible. We’d like to hear from you and your HR/OD partners about how they see innovation management in the organisation.
We discussed whether innovation is treated as a profession with trained, dedicated people - just like HR or Marketing - or whether it is treated as team based project work. Where does HR think innovation management is on the continuum from project to profession, and where should it be?
Gina Colarelli O’Connor is Professor of Innovation Management and Fischer Family Chaired Professor at Babson College. She conducts research and teaches on the topic of Corporate Innovation. Prior to joining Babson in 2018, Professor O’Connor was a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lally School of Management, where she also served as the Director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship, Director of the MBA program, Director of the Radical Innovation Research program, and Associate Dean.
Gina has published numerous scholarly papers and co-authored three books for organizational leaders on managing breakthrough innovation in large mature companies. Five of her papers have received best paper of the year awards. The second book, Grabbing Lightning was named one of the top books of the year by Strategy + Business Magazine in 2009 and the third, Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation through People, was nominated for the Academy of Management’s Best Book of the Year in 2019. In 2018 Gina was honored to be named a Crawford Fellow by the Product Development & Management Association. She has worked with many mature organizations to help them build Strategic Innovation capabilities, and now is converting her research into Executive Education as the academic leader of Babson’s Corporate Innovation Practice area.
Peter Robbins is one of Ireland’s foremost experts in organisational innovation. A former Global Director of Innovation Excellence for GSK, he has trained in the renowned Stanford D School in Design Thinking and completed a doctorate on the topic of organisational innovation. He has led many of the worldwide, new product development and launch programmes for Lucozade, Aquafresh, Sensodyne, Panadol, Ribena, alli and NiQuitin. Peter’s PhD is in Innovation. His area of research is how firms organise for innovation. He is a former head of the Department of Design Innovation in Maynooth University. He is a member of the Irish Government’s National Design Forum and has developed and run courses and workshops in innovation for organisations in the public and private sector. He is on a number of innovation advisory boards in business and the third sector. Peter is a graduate of London’s What-if creativity programme. He has published in R&D Management, the Irish Journal of Management: International Journal of Innovation Management; London Strategy Review and regularly speaks at international conferences on the subject of managing creativity and innovation.
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