Business is a field not of theory but of practice. The central intellectual inquiry of the science of management is simply this: What works? That, it seems, is the best way to examine the steady rise in the practice of innovation management. A search of the database of the professional networking site LinkedIn found that more than 700 people listed their current job title as “chief innovation officer” and that nearly 25,000 had the word “innovation” in their job title… For innovation champions, titles matter far less than their independence, breadth of knowledge and corporate clout, experts say. “Whatever you call it, there is a real need for a senior-level executive to be able to reach across a company and beyond to tap ideas, skills and resources,” said Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is this systems integration aspect that is central to innovation as a field and a discipline.”
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