Leadership for Innovation

This report builds on discussions that took place at the fourth UK Management Research Forum organised by AIMResearch, the Chartered Institute of Management and the Department of Trade and Industry. In summary, the reportcontends that:• Leaders both motivate employees and design effective organisations:There are two broad conceptions of what leaders do – they motivate their followers and they design organisationalcontexts to enable their followers to function effectively. We explore these concepts using the extant body of literatureon leadership. In doing so, we note that much of the literature sees the leader as an individual, rather than recognisingthe potential for distributed leadership.• The nature of innovation is contingent upon the organisational context:Innovations can be usefully thought of in terms of the type of innovation (product, service, process, organisationaland/or market) and the degree of novelty required. These two dimensions – type of innovation and degree of novelty– determine which organisational contexts and strategic approaches are appropriate for different innovations. The roleof leadership in the innovation process is less clear and research in this field still is in its infancy.• Organisational enablers of innovation provide a link between leadershipand innovation:We propose that leadership can impact innovation through its influence on the organisational enablers of innovation.These include leadership systems, structures, processes, culture, competencies and networks.To summarise, this report argues that leadership can affect innovation, but in more complex ways than would beimplied by a focus solely on inspirational leadership. In particular we need to acknowledge that leaders can act throughthe design of organisations and that leadership itself can be distributed rather than individualised.[...]