Fascination with the New CIO

There's a new kind of CIO on the streets these days, and it isn't what you might expect: a corporate juggernaut crunching numbers, running financials, or even entertaining colleagues at the Hilton. They are the freshest, newest, keenest kind of corporate leader, The Chief Innovation Officer. Holding the concept of running businesses based off of plans to innovate, imagine, and inspire change in his/her back pocket, today's new CIO takes corporate-or perhaps even small business-leadership to a new kind of crowd: the creatives. These individuals are not merely entrepreneurs or go-getters, they are the kind of people that like to gather ideas and synthesize them into plans for making things better. They come up with new ways of thinking about things by restructuring old tricks, or mixing mediums/industries.

If social theorists are correct, then this is the wave of the future. Many postulate that we are entering into the "Age of Innovation," and with the economy in a dire spot right now, companies are scrambling for a new way of doing business. Herein lies the solution: broadening the idea of what it means to do business, considering not just what the consumer will buy, but how products shape the consumer's identity, how they impact culture, how they affect the environment. This goes well beyond "triple bottom line" theory, it's all about change. With a President-elect boasting the start of a new regime based around this concept, I think we can learn a thing or two from the innovators. People want something new, and if "something new" doesn't really exist, then perhaps the key lies in finding ways to revamp the old. Chief Innovation Officers are cropping up around corporate America for just such a purpose. A 2006 article suggests that the perfect candidate for such a position will exhibit the following traits:

• Possessess the mindset of an inventor, that is, of a person who is not limited by what he or she already knows.


• Originates new ideas but also recognize[s] innovative ideas generated by other people


• Brings vision to the role beyond the traditional leader's ability to maximize the performance and contribution of colleagues

(http://www.timeinc.net/fortune/conferences/innovation2006/heidrick.pdf)

I'm fascinated.