Completed notes of the course

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1 Leadership and Innovation Teachers: Mariano Corso Luca Gastaldi 2 3 1. Leadership and Innovation Relationship We must study leadership and innovation together, since they are two faces of the same coin. Why innovation? Because if we don’t innovate, we cannot be forever in the market. Running operations is a routinary process, but then there are innovation projects, which are very different because they start with the objective of dying since they have a beginning and an end. The real difficulty is not the process itself, but the point is to make the outcome of the project the new operation, so the overlapping is the tricky point. Change management process is very challenging and difficult to standardize: for years managers had to choose between running operations and developing innovative processes. Today the pace of innovation process is increasing drastically everyday: innovation and change are seen as an everybody and everyday challenge. Therefore, companies must behave in an ambidextrous way. Today, we are living in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by these new characteristics: • Pace: time available before the full impact of innovation is shorter and shorter. • Pervasiveness: innovation is not something episodic or sporadic but rather it is an everyday and everybody business. • Openness: sources of innovation are more and more outside the company boundaries with actors that in many cases are non-contractible by the company. Why leadership? Because to promote and realize innovation nowadays being a good manager is not enough, because innovation is not something that can be done in R&D anymore, but it is an act of inspiring people, designing new services and new communication and, to do it, we need to be a leader. Indeed: A manager is someone who…