Dawn Of The Idea Czar

Billy Edwards' colleagues at Advanced Micro Devices have
called him their utility infielder. AMD's human resources chief Kevin Lyman
calls him the chipmaker's agent provocateur. Officially, though, Edwards is
called AMD's chief innovation officer, a newly created role for this senior
vice-president.

Although Edwards, 50, has a PhD in materials science
engineering and has worked around semiconductors for much of his career, he has
also headed up strategy at the Sunnyvale company, run a startup, and worked as a
consultant for The Boston Consulting Group. So when AMD formalized a role that
would lead its innovation effort last September (or, as Lyman describes it,
“put an 'X' on the back of someone to consciously drive it”), Edwards'
diverse experience, gregarious personality, and penchant for disrupting
traditional ways of thinking fit the bill. “A chief innovation officer needs
to be this blend of marketer, technologist, strategist, and business person,”
says Lyman.

In other words, Edwards' new role goes far beyond
dreaming up the next chip iteration for AMD. Rather, he'll be spearheading
audacious projects that don't neatly fit into any of the company's current
functions.

New Hybrid

A thirst for internal growth across Corporate America has made innovation a
critical management mandate. As a result, the initials 'CIO' have
increasingly begun to refer not to chief information officers, but to yet
another C-suite label, the chief innovation officer. That and similar titles,
such as vice-president of innovation, are popping up in companies from Citigroup
to Coca-Colato health insurer Humana. Titles of this magnitude send a clear
message to the organization: Innovation is an urgent priority and someone should
be accountable for it. Most of the large executive search firms are reporting a
dramatic uptick in requests for such people.

While companies have long had VP-level scientists running
research and development, or marketers steering new product development, these
innovation chiefs are a new hybrid breed. If they don't directly report to the
chief executive, they typically have direct access and, like Edwards, their jobs
are more broadly defined. As companies continue to figure out just what
innovation is, managers charged with running it have seen their responsibilities
evolve. Rather than encompass only new products, innovation has come to include
everything from finding new business models and fresh ways to glean customer
insights, to shaping a more creative corporate culture.

The structure of the role varies widely: Some CIOs have
sizable teams while others are more like internal consultants, and the job may
be most closely tied to strategy, marketing, or R&D. Tierney Remick, a
managing director with executive search firm Korn/Ferry International, says most
of the innovation officer-led teams she's seen have started small and grown
over time as the responsibilities of the role have expanded.

That's the case at Humana, which named its chief medical
officer, Dr Jonathan T Lord, to the newly created post of chief innovation
officer in 2001. Initially, Lord's approximately 15-person team was formed to
find new innovations for Humana's core insurance products. “It was a smaller
team, a smaller scope, and a narrower agenda,” says Lord.

But over time, Lord's team, which is housed on the
company's “Innovation Center” floor in its Louisville headquarters, has
itself become a corporate function. The team has swelled to 150 employees, many
of whom Lord has recruited from places like General Electric Co (GE ), Procter
& Gamble Co (PG ), and the defense industry, with an eye toward bringing in
outsiders' perspective and expertise. Lord now keeps a hodgepodge of corporate
initiatives under his umbrella. Among them: ethnographic consumer research,
external partnerships, and, beginning last year, mergers and acquisitions.

As Humana shows, there seems to be a place for innovation
czars at companies of all stripes, but they are particularly hot in the food and
consumer-goods industries. P&G, Kellogg, Hershey, Wm. Wrigley Jr, and Newell
Rubbermaid have all added high-ranking innovation execs to their lineups in
recent years.

'Silver-tongued'

According to headhunters, candidates with marketing backgrounds are filling
more of the newly created CIO positions. Although some level of technical
knowhow-or a lot, at a tech company such as AMD-confers credibility in this
cross-functional gig, CIOs have to be able to sell high-risk new ventures
throughout often-skeptical corporate fiefdoms. “Marketers are typically pretty
silver-tongued,” says Greg Welch, who heads up the marketing officer practice
for executive search firm Spencer Stuart.

Whether the CIO is a battle-tested company vet or a
fresh-thinking outsider, idea generators with little experience implementing
them aren't right for the role. That's one reason why Yankee Candle. chose
veteran brand manager Rick R Ruffolo when it expanded its chief marketing
officer role to link R&D, brand strategy, and marketing. Before arriving at
Yankee Candle in September, Ruffolo had launched new product lines for Limited
Brands' Bath & Body Works and managed brands at SC Johnson & Son and
P&G. Now the product development and marketing departments report through
Ruffolo, whose business card reads senior vice-president of brand, marketing,
and innovation.

If that title's a mouthful, consider the multifarious
duties that confront Ruffolo: establishing a more disciplined way to evaluate
and execute ideas, meeting with operations about innovative manufacturing
processes, and scouting global markets for new devices to deliver Yankee
Candle's fragrances. “If it was just a purely innovation role, I might just
run after all these different gadgets,” says Ruffolo. “But by linking it to
a senior management role, it's not innovation for the sake of innovation.”

For Ruffolo, the chief innovation post meant a higher level
of seniority; for Lord, becoming a CIO was largely an expansion of his
responsibilities. Still, the CIO job is hardly an established rung on the
standard-issue corporate ladder -and the risk of failure is high. But able
candidates are drawn by the position's high visibility and the rewards that
could accompany any successes.

By Jena McGregor,

with Amy Barrett in Philadelphia