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Do innovation managers understand their importance?

Yorai Gabriel
Aug 31, 2018 · 2 min read

Professional innovation managers should aspire to be as significant to executive management as any C-level.

In leading companies, there are four critical control and realization functions, that together provide senior management with a stream of essential guidelines and a set of domain-specific services. These functions are legal, finance, tech and marketing. In breakthrough companies, there is another critical control and realization function — innovation.

Innovation managers should aspire to be as valuable as superior legal, finance, tech and marketing services if they want to take part in building the competitive infrastructure of the next generation businesses

What makes control and realization functions so valuable?

  1. They have domain expertise in evaluating and understanding risks and opportunities that lie ahead and provide critical down to the point insights and recommendations.
  2. They can manage complex domain-specific, systemic services independently, as turnkey deliverables. Because they provide executive and operational services, that are domain expert

All four control and realization functions are mysterious to one another and communicate through particular interfaces and deliverables, which keeps them at constant amazement and suspicion.

Innovation managers in most companies are still ideators, veteran talents or free moving evangelists that suggest nice to have or speculative must have’s for other parties to realize. Whether in innovation centers or r&d centers, most innovation managers are internal salespeople with little influence of actual deliverables. as long as this is the situation, innovation management will not have a significant place at the table

What sort of domain-specific services innovation departments should create? Anything that comes out as a bottom line deliverable. — a bottom line financial data, clear-cut requirements or inception documents, a reliable and educated recommendation. further more, innovation management should aspire to be able to produce outcomes independently of other functions, or though careful and precise purchasing of services from other management domains.


If you read this far then, this topic is of interest to you. I’m glad. Let me know what you’re thinking by adding some comments. Can innovation managers become as valuable as legal, finance tech and marketing? What would be their domain-specific services?

Yorai Gabriel

Written by

Google Developer Expert for Product strategy. I write about Design, Creativity and Innovation management.

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