I think this concept of “CINO” is already obsolete.
Better to ask what system or set of organizational principles allow each of us to innovate with a requisite degree of self-determination.
For example, the principles of self-organization as espoused in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations could be one way to go. Or another book I am reading, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning which seeks to extrapolate more universal learnings from the principles of Agile Software Development techniques.
Along these lines I find the concept of a CINO self-defeating. To allocate all of the responsibility of “innovation” onto one individual or team in a centralized defined manner is an oxymoron.
Innovation necessarily requires a cross-section of disciplines and interaction between multiple touch points within a firm. In particular, any employee who has client-facing responsibilities plays an absolutely essential role in any innovation. They provide the necessary feedback for the firm to iterate on their product or services. This process of soliciting feedback, learning, iterating is the functional driver of what looks like innovation.
In fact, I don’t personally believe it is anything magical or spontaneous per se, but rather an explicit process whereby one maintains and manages a connection between themselves and others through the course of an ongoing dialogue.
The second component of this, self-organization, is one tactic (and just that a tactic, not necessarily a silver bullet in and of itself) that allows larger organizations to iterate faster and more responsively to customer feedback.
A centralized command and control role for innovation would collapse from its own disintermediation. It, by definition, would be too far removed from the dialogues between customers and between team mates to prove of any real use.
Thus, the answer is indeed, for all of us to be CINO’s, respectively. However, this can only happen if the organization is structured in a way to support and promote this behavior. And this, in turn, can only happen if founders and leaders are courageous enough to distance themselves from practices that are so heavily ingrained in our social and corporate cultures.
