To having an important insight about entrepreneurship and leadership will be favorable for enterprises or companies. In addition, Innovation is very much about ability of entrepreneur to look at markets, technologies and business models and interpret them "differently".
(Teece, 2009)
What is Leadership
Leadership is the ability to influence, motivate and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness of the organisation of which they are menbers.Managers tend to operate within existing ways of thinking,whereas leaders often challenge those way and look for new approaches.Seldom content,leaders never arrive,simply continue the journey. However, leadership qualities have developed and become more innovative because the complex business environment and the diverse culture. (Notes)
So, there is absolutely different between traditional leadership and innovation leadership. Traditional approaches to the study of leadership have not specifically addressed the requisite characteristics for executive leadership in such firms. In high-technology firms, CEOs play an important role in creating a corporate environment that fosters innovation and firms reliant on innovation require the effective utilization of people as well as the ability to create and disseminate innovation. (Edosomwan,2009)
Strategic Leadership and Innovation
in High Technology Firms
(Edosomwan,2009)
In high-technology firms, CEOs play an important role in creating a corporate environment that fosters or inhibits innovation and firms reliant on innovation require the effective utilization of people as well as the ability to create and disseminate innovation. The CEO can either encourage basic research by creating well paid research fellow positions (IBM and DuPont adopted this) and by encouraging collaborations with universities or she can implement strategies that weaken the productivity of scientists (for example by linking salary increases to the assumption of managerial responsibilities). Simply put, effective innovation requires that resources are routed to basic research and CEOs have great power to influence innovation decisions since they are the central strategic decision maker. An effective leader in a high technology environment must simultaneously influence the invention, development, and commercialization of new products and services. High technology firms, therefore, have unique requirements for effective leadership.
(Edosomwan,2009)
The link between leadership and strategy is clear. CEOs can sometimes hinder and sometimes promote the development of dynamic capabilities in organizations. CEOs’ contributions in hightechnology firms is a matter of how well they can create something brand new, but most importantly, how well they can protect, build on, and improve what was in place before, perhaps prior to their arrival. However, traditional approaches to the study of leadership have not specifically addressed the requisite characteristics for executive leadership in such firms.
University of Miami professors, Marianna Makri and Terri A. Scandura, studied the effects of CEO leadership on innovation, and identified new concepts in strategic leadership specifically related to high technology leadership, operational and creative leadership. Their results are detailed in an article entitled, "Exploring the Effects of Creative Leadership on Innovation in High-Technology Firms.”
http://www.bus.miami.edu/_assets/files/executive-education/leadership-institute/strategic-leadership.pdf
Comment:
Innovation can provide positive inside for the company. In particular, in high technology firms, innovation is required to be applied in different apartments. In addition, innovation can help leader form positive leadership and assist in making decision. Innovation can improve peoples’ skills on working in technology firms. As global economy is developing, technology need to be improve simultaneously, if technology still be stable, the firms will not have operation and will be fail in the market. Compared to the traditional leadership, the innovative leadership now has been used widely because the global business is becoming complex while the tradition leadership cannot motivate employees. Eventually, innovation is very much favorable for business running in the global market.
Operational leadership focuses on the development of new products and commercializing these innovations. An effective operational leader must be able to sell those inventions andcommunicate effectively with the external market. According to the study, “a CEO exhibiting characteristics of operational leadership would put an emphasis on playing a boundary spanning role by communicating with the external environment, identifying opportunities externally, and creating new knowledge contexts by extending existing product/market domains via mergers and acquisitions, alliances, or joint ventures.” A high technology firm may produce a large number of inventions, but these may be of little value unless the CEO is able to push them through the pipeline, commercialize them and derive a profit from them. As projects move from the invention phase to development and commercialization, an effective operational leader would be skilled in securing resources, and communicating with external constituencies (e.g. FDA). In other words, a successful operational leader must continually monitor and evaluate opportunities in the external environment in order to broaden the firm’s knowledge-creation opportunities by external knowledge acquisition.
CEOs constantly assess the gap between their existing capabilities and the targeted capabilities to decide whether to seek new capabilities from outside the firm or to develop them internally. This selection capability is crucial for long-term performance and strategic renewal. As such, ambidexterity in leadership is important. While CEOs who exhibit operational leadership characteristics would try to seek new capabilities from outside the firm, CEOs with creative leadership characteristics would look internally for such capabilities. Obviously this search process would be optimal when the leader is able to select the appropriate mode of strategic renewal.
To this point, Makri’s and Scandura’s study argues, “that CEOs of high technology firms who are able to simultaneously focus on the external and internal environment, and on developing new knowledge as well as commercializing it, would be more effective leaders.” An ambidextrous firm able to simultaneously explore and exploit, able to simultaneously invent and innovate, will outperform firms that emphasize one at the expense of the other. Simply put,CEOs who are able to simultaneously focus on the external and internal environment, will be more effective leaders. While these two leadership styles are important for leaders in all firms,for firms in the high-technology environment which relies on streams of innovation for longterm success, they are critical. The study suggested that in high technology firms, creative and operational leadership will be positively related to the quantity and quality of innovations.
The study’s findings are important for firms as they consider both dimensions of creative and operational leadership in the emergence of leadership of high technology firms and evaluate their performance. These dimensions may be relevant to the question of CEO compensation in high technology firms. According to Makri and Scandura’s findings, “operational and creative leadership characteristics are effective predictors of innovation productivity and quality. As such, it is important that boards of directors consider these behavioral characteristics when setting CEO pay in addition to considering financial outcomes.” More specifically, high-technology firms can be more effective if they base CEO incentives on a combination of short-term financial results (ROE) and indicators of long-term innovation quality (investment in basic research). Such a compensation system encourages a CEO to commercialize innovations but also reinforces behaviors that enhance the firm’s ability to innovate in the long run.
