BUSINESS LEADER’S ROLE IN INNOVATION CULTURE ESTABLISHMENT

Phuoc D. Nguyen

Business leaders play a key role in building and developing an innovation culture. Their role is to shape the innovation culture environment and norms, recruit people who are suitable for the innovation and cultural value system, and innovation leaders create motivation for employees. Leaders determine that innovation is for the sake of the employee and that it will attract more support and enthusiasm rather than requiring employees to change for the benefit of the company. Davila, Epstein, and Shelton (2013) defined, “One of the key roles of the CEO is to make innovation part of the culture of the company. Putting the innovation strategy and systems in place is not enough. The CEO needs to work on and in the innovation culture.” (Locations 4439 & 4442). One of the important steps that a leader can take to enable innovation is to decide whether to STOP doing something because without changing priorities and eliminating some tasks employees have too many jobs. Therefore, they will insist that they are too busy dealing with current affairs and do not have time for innovation.

Szczepańska-Woszczyna (2014) proposed, “Assessing the role of managers and operational staff in the innovation processes, the respondents divided the tasks in the following way: the role of the manager is to stimulate or trigger innovation of employees, control the innovation process, motivate others to be creative, lead in the implementation of innovative processes, organize the various stages and conduct the process of specific innovation implementation, plan and initiate the innovation process.” (p. 37). Leaders establish cross-functional teams to face organizational challenges, workflows, technology, training, and changes; motivate and encourage staff to participate in the development of an innovative-driven organization; revise job descriptions to reflect the change and to decide what work does NOT need to be done to have time further for innovation.